Jacques Loveall
President, UFCW 8-Golden State
UFCW International Vice President
This summer, Mission Impossible: 8 hit theaters with its biggest adversary yet: “The Entity,” a rogue Artificial Intelligence (AI) bent on destabilizing the world unless Ethan Hunt and his IMF team can rein it in.
The film’s core warning—that AI becomes an existential threat in the wrong hands—strikes a nerve with those of us on the front lines of the retail food and drug industries.
Whether self-flying drones in the sky or vision-AI scanners at the check stand and throughout the workplace, any tool powerful enough to optimize every decision also carries the risk of replacing our livelihoods.
Consider the company Everseen’s “Evercheck” platform. It uses real-time computer vision to analyze every barcode scan, customer basket, and cashier movement, identifying more than 30 distinct “shrink” patterns—from honest mistakes to organized theft—and automatically adjusting store policies and layouts to stamp out losses.
In practice, this “robotic overseer” has the potential to eliminate the need for a human loss-prevention specialist, an inspector on the floor, or even a clerk checking IDs; there are countless jobs hundreds of thousands of Union members at risk every day.
The wave of automation doesn’t stop at shrink prevention:
- Robotic stock-replenishment vehicles already patrol grocery store aisles, scanning for low inventory and restocking pallets without a single shelf-stock associate.
- Automated bagging machines are fast approaching the dexterity to handle produce, fragile items, and odd-shaped packages; jobs once thought to be uniquely human.
- Prescription-filling robots in pharmacies can now count, label, and seal bottles of pills at speeds no human technician can match.
- And, of course, self-checkout lanes have become the norm in many stores rather than the exception, sidelining countless cashiers.
Left unchecked, these technologies pose a threat to every classification of work UFCW 8 represents. Our members didn’t choose to be on the cutting edge of this technological battlefield; corporations did. And like Ethan Hunt, we can’t simply surrender the controls of “The Entity” to corporate bean counters whose mission is maximizing short-term profits.
Which is why, at the negotiating table, we’re drawing a hard line: AI and automation must augment—not annihilate—our jobs.
We aren’t making radical demands. They’re the same basic safeguards we’d seek if our stores were outfitted with aerial bombardment drones or autonomous tanks. Because the stakes are just as high–not the fate of the planet, but the financial security and dignity of hundreds of thousands of Union members and their families in communities nationwide are at risk.
Like Ethan Hunt refusing to hand over “The Entity” to interests seeking to weaponize it, we must insist AI in our workplaces be tamed by principles of justice, equity, and respect for labor.
Our mission—should we choose to accept it—is to ensure innovation empowers people rather than rendering them obsolete.
The world of work is changing faster than any blockbuster plot. But as every good IMF team knows, daring teamwork and strategic planning can beat back even the most fearsome adversaries.
One could say the success of the team in MI: 8 and the successes of UFCW 8 are alike because …
