00:00Waking headlines in national newspapers and sparking conversations on social media.
00:04The Workers' Daily, this is of course the official mouthpiece of China's umbrella trade union organization,
00:10is calling on regulators to protect labor rights amid China's rapid adoption of AI.
00:16Yeah, for more context really on the coverage, Min Min Lo, our China correspondent here,
00:20just to help you guys understand, certainly the context is job and employment stability.
00:25So what are you seeing here?
00:27Yeah, this is definitely a big concern now, right?
00:30It's already showing up in the macro data.
00:32Actually, since COVID, we have very elevated youth unemployment rates and it actually hasn't come down.
00:37It's still hovering around 16 percent and the overall unemployment rate is still hovering above 5 percent.
00:43And this is really being accelerated by AI adoption, right?
00:47Because it's going to touch every corner of the economy by 2030.
00:50That's part of the government plan.
00:52And the thing about China is under the labor laws, if a company wants to lay off workers, more than
00:5710 percent of its workers,
00:59it actually needs to seek government approval.
01:01So what we are seeing now is not so much of these headline grabbing mass layoffs,
01:07but very quiet phased sort of layoffs and quiet attrition.
01:12It could look like non-renewal of contracts.
01:14It could look like a freeze or slowdown in hiring or a reduction of wages, particularly entry level wages.
01:20And the reason why we are paying to this article on the Workers' Daily is because it's seen largely as
01:26the mouthpiece
01:27or the voice of the working class people in China.
01:30And it's something that the Chinese government would pay attention to because economic discontent
01:35is one of the biggest drivers of social instability and protests in China.
01:40And according to this article, what are they saying are the specific threats that AI is posing to the labor
01:46force now?
01:47So the most obvious one, of course, is job displacement.
01:51But the less obvious one that they pointed out is quite interesting.
01:54It's more about intellectual property and copyright infringement because many companies now are requiring their employees
02:01to train an AI avatar that can do their job.
02:05So that requires them to put in all their personal data, their personal knowledge accumulated over the years
02:11to train an AI avatar that would basically make your own job obsolete.
02:15And then you, in that process, also hand over a lot of their intellectual property.
02:20It's a bit of a legal gray area.
02:22And this is what the article is calling for the government to start investigating.
02:25Another area is with regard to these low-wage workers, particularly the ride-hailers, the delivery workers,
02:33because of the use of algorithms and passing out these orders and adjusting some of these fluctuating unit prices,
02:43some of these workers find that they are actually getting wages that are less than before.
02:48But it's hard to argue their case because you don't really know how these algorithms really work behind the scenes.
02:53So again, getting more transparency on that front is another major issue as well.
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