Emerging Technologies

Digital trust: How ethical tech empowers workers and why workers empower ethical tech 

Workers interact at a Polarium energy-storage facility, where they make energy storage and optimization solutions, built on lithium-ion battery technology for businesses within telecom, commercial and industrial facilities across the world, in Cape Town, South Africa, April 5, 2023. REUTERS/Esa Alexander

At the core of digital trust is assurance that technological innovation supports user choices and respects their agency. Image: REUTERS/Esa Alexander

Christy Hoffman
General Secretary, UNI Global Union
Daniel Dobrygowski
Head, Governance and Trust, World Economic Forum
This article is part of: World Economic Forum Annual Meeting
  • Engaging workers and their unions in technology decision-making ensures fairness, respect for rights and trustworthy outcomes.
  • Businesses, governments and workers must collaboratively define principles to ensure ethical, secure and inclusive technology development.
  • Social dialogue and collective bargaining are critical for aligning technology deployment with workers’ rights and societal impact.

Earning trust in new technologies is hard. Trust plays a vital role in every aspect of new technology – from development to deployment to adoption.

Ignoring individuals’ agency or failing on privacy or other important values along that cycle can break down trust. This ultimately threatens the institutions and economic progress that are increasingly reliant on innovative technologies.

We’ve seen the critical role that innovative companies, specifically the information communication technology industry, play in earning trust.

Governments and consumers are also crucial, but too often, the role and importance in achieving the digital trust of workers and the trade unions that represent them are ignored.

Earning trust continuously involves multiple stakeholders. Trust is most sustainable when business leaders, government regulators, workers, and trade unions jointly develop and implement a standard set of principles and goals centred around trustworthy decision-making for everyone.

Workers who work on and with new technologies are particularly important for earning digital trust. Yet, there is a striking lack of attention to ensuring workers' trust in new technologies.

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Creating standards for digital trust

Creators of new technologies should adhere to certain responsibilities, including the goals of trustworthy technology: safety, security, reliability, accountability, good oversight, and inclusive, ethical, and responsible use of technology.

This includes ensuring that deployed technologies aren’t based on poor working conditions in the digital supply chain, especially among workers in “digital enhancement”, and that they do not hinder working conditions for those impacted by deployment.

At the core of digital trust is assurance that technological innovation supports user choices and respects their agency. Everyone working on developing technology or using the technology at work is a stakeholder in digital trust.

Therefore, to earn trust, global guarantees must be provided to ensure the trust and respect of workers in this development process, both in their capacity as tech creators and as subjects of technology.

These global guarantees can only drive positive change if trade unions, as the collective voice of workers, are involved in the process and effective social dialogue is facilitated.

As users and technology subjects, workers have human rights and labour rights. Decisions about the use of technology – not the technology itself – can threaten those rights. The context in which new technologies are introduced is fundamental to whether they support the development of digital trust or build mistrust instead.

Integrating workers

Recent collective bargaining negotiations have illuminated how trust in technology –specifically, trust in technology owners’ decision-making – affects workers’ expectations of how their rights will be respected in the future work landscape.

For workers to be at the decision-making table to build a more trustworthy future technological landscape for everyone, collective bargaining and social dialogue must be built into that process.

Building on the World Economic Forum’s Digital Trust Framework, business leaders must involve trade unions and worker representatives in considering the following questions when developing or deploying new technologies:

  • What are the expectations of our workers regarding their rights and values?
  • How can we best incorporate workers’ views into the company’s technology decision-making process?
  • How does the company’s treatment of its technology workers affect how other stakeholders trust its products or services?

Given their dual role as technology creators and subjects and their presence and oversight along the development process, workers can also share in the responsibilities demanded by trustworthy technology.

Fairness is a key dimension of digital trust, and workers (as developers and users) have valuable insights into what may be seen as unfair and untrustworthy in the market.

Many hands

Where digital trust demands that technologies respect user privacy and developers adhere to good cybersecurity practices, workers can put those into place and raise awareness if they are not met.

During their jobs, workers see and produce the information required to ensure the development and deployment of technologies are auditable and transparent.

In these ways, workers who help shoulder the responsibility for digital trust are the most effective “early warning system” for companies to ensure that the technologies they are developing are as trustworthy as possible before they face the ultimate make-or-break test of public exposure.

Workers can only play this vital role if they, too, have a voice in technology decisions, which requires structured, ongoing dialogue with their trade unions.

Many hands make light work, or, as the open-source community says, “Many eyes make all bugs shallow.” When developing and deploying innovative technologies and reviewing code and hardware require many hands and eyes, workers are key to avoiding minor bugs and major errors that will erode trust.

As technological development accelerates, the key to building digital trust is involving workers in decisions about how new technologies will be introduced, their consequences for employment, and their impact on society.

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World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

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