The 18th-century notion of the panopticon — a circular prison design with a guard station in the middle, allowing a single officer to enforce discipline by keeping watch over all the prisoners — has become real in the 21st century through AI-driven surveillance against workers: It’s the Amazon warehouse. It should be no surprise that the company that harnessed technology to create a vast, $2.
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When Cai Qiong Liu applied for a visa to come to the U.S., she told officials she was in search of a better life. As soon as she arrived in 2005, Liu’s friend got her a job as a home health aide, which she kept for 18 years. For half of those years, Liu worked four to five consecutive 24-hour shifts a week, providing demanding live-in care for a patient who had suffered a stroke: helping her…
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Amid growing concerns over food safety in the United States, President Donald Trump last month authorized the duty-free importation of 660 million pounds of cheap beef trimmings that will get mixed in with other cuts to make ground beef. Imported beef and pork were once labeled with their country of origin, but Congress voted in 2015 to end that requirement, so customers at the grocery store will…
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When Sara Ramirez started as an interpreter for Monterey, California-based LanguageLine Solutions, in October 2020, she saw it as “a regular company.” She worked part-time as a Spanish-language interpreter from her home in El Paso, Texas, translating by phone for clients that included the Federal Emergency Management Agency, banks and hospitals. If she encountered a problem…
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https://www.spreaker.com/show/2952221/episodes/feed
On August 27, registered nurses, patients, and community allies rallied and stopped traffic in cities around the US to demand that hospitals and elected officials cut all ties with artificial intelligence giant Palantir. In this episode of Working People, we speak with a panel of registered nurses—Kelli Brennan (Portland, Maine), Lee Barker (Kansas City, Missouri), and Kiera Arbour (Chicago, Illinois)—about National Nurses United’s “Purge Palantir!” campaign, and about the disturbing creep of Big Tech and Big Brother into a US healthcare system that is already in crisis.
Additional links/info:
National Nurses Organizing Committee/National Nurses United website, Facebook page, Twitter/X page, and Instagram
National Nurses United: “Nurses hold nationwide civil disobedience actions to demand ‘Palantir Out!’”
Sheera Frenkel & Aaron Krolik, The New York Times, “Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans”
Aisha Down & Robert Booth, The Guardian, “Palantir manifesto described as ‘ramblings of a supervillain’ amid UK contract fears”
Featured Music:
Jules Taylor, Working People Theme Song
Credits:
Audio Post-Production: Jules Taylor
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we are speaking with union nurses who are speaking out against big tech and big brother, sneaking more of their tentacles into our healthcare system and into our lives. They and their union, National Nurses United, participated in a National Day of Action on August 27th, which brought together hundreds of registered nurses, patients, and community allies in cities around the country to demand that hospitals and elected officials cut all ties with artificial intelligence