With AFL-CIO, Kochan to Launch Course on Technology’s Impact

MIT Sloan Professor Thomas A. Kochan will be launching an innovative new online class to help train labor representatives to negotiate about technology and its impact on the future of work. This class, “Bringing Workers’ Voice into Technology and Employment Strategies,” will be offered in partnership with the AFL-CIO Technology Institute and is slated to begin in September 2022.

Kochan is an expert on work and employment relations who is the George M. Bunker Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan and a Professor Post-Tenure (a title MIT Sloan offers to Emeritus Professors maintaining an active research role) at the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research. Kochan, who is the coauthor, with Lee Dyer, of the book “Shaping the Future of Work: A Handbook for Action and a New Social Contract” (Routledge, 2021), was a member of the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future and has written extensively about both the future of work and worker voice.

“This class hopes to fill a need that we identified in our research on the future of work. Today worker representatives need to be involved in the earliest design stages of technology development, instead of only being able to negotiate over the effects of technology decisions on workers long after the key decisions are made,” Kochan said. “This requires building capacity among worker representatives on the front lines. That’s why we are doing this in partnership with the labor movement.”

“We are thrilled to partner with Professor Kochan and his team to develop this course for labor unions across the country,” said Amanda Ballantyne, Director of the AFL-CIO’s Technology Institute. “This course will help local union leaders and their members lead in the development of strategies to ensure that tech implementation benefits workers and improves the quality of work.”

In creating the new course, Kochan and Meghan Perdue, a Digital Learning Scientist at MITx, will build on a previous online course on shaping the future of work that they, together with several other MIT faculty members, offered to the general public for a number of years. (An earlier version of that course, “Shaping the Future of Work,” is now archived on MIT’s OpenCourseWare platform.)

Kochan, Perdue, and a committee of AFL-CIO representatives are now hard at work designing the new course and hope to launch a first pilot later this year when the new MITx platform is in place. Like all MITx courses, it will be open to anyone who is interested in it, but the key target audience is worker representatives in unions who are on the front lines of ensuring that technology will be used to benefit their members as well as the firms that employ them.

Funding to support this project is provided by Ford Foundation, MITx, and the Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab (J-WEL) at MIT.