What good is a nurse’s union that spends nurses’ money to make their jobs harder?

On August 27, National Nurses United, the nation’s largest nurses’ union, staged coordinated protests across eight American cities.

Were they picketing for better pay, safer staffing or less paperwork?

No. They coordinated the protests to demand that hospitals cancel contracts with Palantir, whose systems help schedule staff, manage records, and cut the administrative load that burns people out. The union marched its members into the street to stop hospitals from adopting tools that could put their members back at the bedside, in the roles they had trained for.

The same pattern is appearing wherever new tools threaten a dues structure. When the International Longshoremen’s Association went to the bargaining table, it passed over retraining and a share of the gains from a more productive port. It instead demanded an absolute ban on automated cranes and gates and was prepared to choke the country’s supply chain to get it.

In California, SEIU Local 1000 filed grievances seeking a consultative veto over the state’s new artificial intelligence tools, on the theory that a technology that makes a public employee more useful should be slowed or barred. Longshoremen keep American shelves stocked and factories running. State workers can keep the public’s business moving. Both could use better tools to make their jobs more efficient and productive. So why are unions fighting to stop making life better for their........

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