The Construction Cluster was born with the idea of linking all the actors in the activity seeking to sustain and empower the sector with the understanding that successes and misadventures are shared equally. Under this premise, the workers themselves – from their representations, the unions – understood that it was essential to be present. Because our collective commitment is not limited to a salary discussion table, but also to the generation of new jobs.
Making legal relationships more efficient does not mean devaluing rights, but it does mean seeking a win-win balance, which we can find if mutual trust born of respect and consensus is achieved.
The cluster is presented as a shared space to grow in knowledge and, of course, economically. Also, to gradually deconstruct prejudices that still exist between employers and workers. But without a doubt it is an excellent area to set those prejudices aside, if there is really a desire for shared growth.
However, modernization imposes new challenges on all of us: on workers, who must be trained to be part of and companions in artificial intelligence (AI), and on companies, to mark the “technological north” of the new work methodologies that we must manage together before the State.
It is necessary to set a certain date for the incorporation of technology, such as BIM 360 Construction IQ, PlanGrid, Lean Construction and others softwares maybe still in beta projects, but that put the construction industry in the technological 21st century. There are many positive factors; not only the economic ones, but also the social and environmental ones, which we can promote.
In the immediate future, the challenge is to propose a collaborative work scheme, as technological innovators argue. The time of know how as a differentiating element of a company it disappeared; Today it is essential to share information under this collaborative work system.
As a cluster, we must advance under a scheme that contains artificial intelligence and combines construction project programs and costs, suppliers of materials from the entire value chain, and profiles of prepared and trained workers (incorporating their the course of life as input to be processed by algorithms and be part of this challenge that unites us). We need to see the profit as a balance between the economic and the social, encourage ourselves to build a true collaborative social innovation.
Union organizations not only have the duty, but also the obligation to provide our colleagues with a technological tool that comes hand in hand with training, job retraining. We must also guarantee them that their efforts to go back to studying will bear fruit, because their new knowledge will be incorporated into an employment platform that will evaluate suitability for vacancies with a great algorithm that discards any political/business/union recommendation.
If something was missing in all these years of technological advances, it was to evaluate the social impact. This fourth industrial revolution must arrive with the right maturity to establish the necessary balance, “technological equity”.
“An Industry 4.0 arrives to internalize a concept of social fairness and be accompanied by 4.0 workers.” It is not a utopia, it is a new concept of capital and work.
* President of the Argentine Labor Party; Uecara Secretary General of the Interior
