BT engineer
In May 2024, less than a year after BT workers had taken strike action over pay, BT announced £3 billion cost-cutting measures by 2030. The estimation is that this will involve a cut of 55,000 jobs – more than 40% of its global workforce. Of that figure, 10,000 could be replaced by Artificial Intelligence (AI). And of those job losses, over half will come from inside the UK.
Fast forward to the recent New Labour Budget and another announcement from the group that it intends to cover costs by a combination of higher prices and going harder and faster on the existing plans. Bosses blame an extra £100 million bill from the rise in Employers’ National Insurance payments and minimum wage rise.
BT has invested billions – with the help of public funds – building fibre optic and 5G networks. Now the investors are pushing to extract as much profit as possible from the infrastructure.
Part of the plan is to replace jobs with AI and automation. But this has not been without problems. A lot of money has been spent rolling out tech for use by the workforce, ostensibly to improve productivity.
However, as one senior manager experienced, as soon as one new application hit the real world in the workforce, it failed. Before he met the workers outside, no one in higher management had any idea how bad some of the rollouts had been.
Not that the workforce hadn’t warned this was the case, just that those in charge hadn’t been open to taking on board just how bad some of the software releases, signed off as ready to work, had been. Rather than testing, taking on board workers’ feedback and waiting to sign off once properly working, many of the apps we use need frequent manual work-arounds, to be fixed when funds became available.
Increasingly, skilled workers are being driven out of BT, replaced by inexperienced task-driven, typically non-union, contractors. So the work is there, just being done by cheaper labour without the skills to resolve issues. The consequence is delays.
The harder and faster rollout of AI and automation is designed to circumvent this. When a customer places an order, AI will provide the instructions for work for on-the-ground engineers, automation will cut out all the planning and assessment jobs. AI developers would, call this a ‘productivity enhancer’, BT workers would say otherwise!
So far, job losses have in the main been voluntary. but there have been compulsory job losses through a separate strategic buildings review. But on job cuts, compulsory or voluntary, and outsourcing, the leadership of the Communication Workers Union (CWU) has been utterly silent. In the recent telecoms section elections, only two candidates raised the issue of automation and AI, as an aside. Since the 2023 pay dispute, members and officers have been left to deal with individual issues on a case-by-case basis.
Politically, by refusing to press Labour on CWU policy to renationalise BT, workers remain at the mercy of the shareholders and finance capital. The rollout of AI and automation is still at an early stage. No doubt many of BT’s competitors will be looking at how the AI rollout progresses. Certainly they will note how the CWU hasn’t pushed back industrially.
Early workplace experience of AI and automation certainly doesn’t point to it increasing labour productivity in telecommunications. Only with BT and the telecoms network renationalised in full, with workers playing a direct role in AI and automation design, could the technology meet its potential. And rather than spelling job cuts, increased productivity could be used to reduce the working week, without loss of pay, terms and conditions. Work could then be shared out, and contractors on inferior terms offered a role in a renationalised network.