ABSTRACT
According to the changes in the global pattern of capital accumulation, we are witnessing a new industrial and/or technological revolution that promises to transform social relations and communication, work and life practices. This fact, already widely exposed by international literature, has opened an interesting debate that, through measurements, projections, and speculation, warns about processes such as technological unemployment, job disqualification, automation of various tasks and processes, and the robotization of some occupations. However, this process takes its own expressions and specific to the reality of Latin America and the Caribbean, as it occurs gradually, differentiated and limited by the characteristics of enterprises, productive sectors, geographic locations, state policies, projects business, and labor relations. Despite these particularities, similarities are also found with the processes evidenced at a global level, especially in the case of the implications for the organization of work, the transformations in the work process and the problems generated for the employment structure. Currently there is an important and emerging literature focused on the technological changes introduced by the 4.0 revolution in the Latin American region, which involve the diagnosis of supranational entities such as ECLAC, ILO, and OECD, as well as important references in labor studies, the engineering, economics, and public policies. Within the current technological revolution, one of the problems that has already been addressed at a global level, and that which presents it's own particularities in Latin America, is related to labor relations and the challenges present for trade union organizations. In this chapter we will present a review of some of the debates regarding automation, robotization, and the uses of artificial intelligence in Latin America and the Caribbean. We will focus on accounting for the problems involved in the 4.0 revolution for trade union organizations, and what are the main opportunities and resistances found in this new scenario.
