CGT Spain, Solidaires Informatique, and CGT France joint statement
A few weeks ago, BackCon took place in Bordeaux. Unsurprisingly, talk about AI has been the topic: Every single presentation and informal chat touched it one way or another. But what particularly caught our attention was the shared sentiment we perceived of euphoria. From the company’s official stance, as reflected in Thibaud’s email, to those with a somewhat more skeptical view, and those more enthusiastic colleagues, virtually all perspectives accept two basic assumptions:
- AI is ”just” a tool we need to learn how to use and incorporate into our ways of working.
- AI is already a fact in the industry, and Back Market cannot afford to miss this boat.
As workers belonging to the CGT (Spain), CGT (France) and Solidaires Informatique unions, we cannot agree with these assumptions, and we would like to explain why in detail.
Direct risk for workers
Let’s be very clear from the start: AI is a tool to increase productivity. That is it. It is its only purpose.
In the context of Back Market, AI will not enable anything new to be done that workers aren’t already doing. It won’t generate any code that an engineer isn’t already able to write, it won’t design any marketing campaigns, perform any job interviews, or prepare payslips in any way that a human person already does. It will only enable the company to do it faster and using less resources to do so.
This might seem like good news at first. However, it does not offer any material improvement for us as workers. If not accompanied by careful reform of working conditions and compensations, this increase in productivity will result (and it is already resulting) in an immediate increase in work pressure: shorter deadlines, and a rise in the number of projects, tackled by teams that won’t grow accordingly.
As a consequence, we will be suffering from rising stress levels, which will significantly impact our mental health: uncertainty, frustration, and loss of trust in our autonomy and our own judgment.
To put it bluntly: AI is the shortest path to burnout.
Additionally, AI will not take any responsibility for its errors. We are delegating a significant part of our work to a system that we can only control up to a certain point. But make no mistake: for the company, us workers will be the ones fully accountable for AI’s errors. When something goes wrong (and it will), nobody will blame Claude or Gemini, they will blame you.
Promises with no guarantee
The company is telling us over and over again that people will not be fired because of AI. But these explanations come, as always happens when discussing labor policies, without any supporting data, hiring plans, or anything tangible that goes further than empty promises.
The only information we know for a fact is that the hiring rate fell drastically in 2025, so there is no concrete evidence that could help us trust their word. Furthermore, when the company states that they will not fire anybody, they are only talking about engineers, which is the group that already enjoys the best working conditions, and they will also probably be the group less impacted by eventual layoffs. However, in Back Market we are also copywriters, translators, customer care, marketing… roles that are way more vulnerable, and that the company conveniently forgot to mention.
The reality of the industry is harsh: according to Fortune (not exactly a trade union pamphlet), in 2025, 550,000 jobs were lost, only in the US, for reasons directly related to AI. It is a relatively small number, but a terrifying one considering that we are only a couple of years into the AI burst. To put it another way, and always according to Fortune, in 2025 these kind of layoffs increased 900% compared to 2024.
Some predictions executives in the AI sector have made:
- According to Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, entry-level job offers will decrease by half in the next two years.
- According to Jense Huang, Nvidia’s CEO, if your job mainly involves repetitive tasks, you are likely to lose it in the next few years.
- Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, stated in an interview with Tucker Carlson that he believes people whose job is “speaking on the phone or using a computer” (who doesn’t fall into this category?) will lose their job.
Obviously these predictions do not have to become a reality, but they reveal pretty clearly the intentions these people have. They’re telling us why they are building these tools, what their real objective is: increasing productivity, and decreasing the need for low-wage jobs.
We need to keep in mind the fact that all this is happening in the context of several years of massive layoffs in all big tech companies, and that we are on the verge of a massive international crisis. All this makes us think that blindly believing the company when they say that AI will not have an impact for us workers is simply naive. BackMarket is not special, and it does not live above the corporate trends, as we have all seen and suffered many times in the last few years.
Risk for the company’s social mission
Back Market is a certified B-Corp. This means that it has to fulfill strict sustainabiliity, transparency and social responsibility standards. We doubt that a radical shift towards adopting AI will allow the company to maintain them.
Among other criteria, being a B-Corp company means:
- Actively defending Human Rights. The AI providers we mainly use are Anthropic and OpenAI, which are both companies that are collaborating with the US and the Israeli army in the genocide in Palestine, and the war in Iran. We doubt that using these providers is compatible with defending Human Rights.
- Fair Work. We would like to hear how the company is going to justify the expected levels of stress and burnout that result from the large scale adoption of AI. Also, AI companies have openly declared several times that their business would not be possible to maintain without massive intellectual property theft of artists, writers and journalists’ work. Again, it is hard to justify ethical work policies while using the services of such providers.
- Fair Work. We would like to hear how the company is going to justify the expected levels of stress and burnout that result from the large scale adoption of AI. Also, AI companies have openly declared several times that their business would not be possible to maintain without massive intellectual property theft of artists, writers and journalists’ work. Again, it is hard to justify ethical work policies while using the services of such providers. These tensions are not only theoretical, and we would like to know what the company’s real plan to keep the B-Corp certificate is, and hopefully this plan will not consist in a mere social-washing scheme.
Conclusions
Technology is never neutral, and even less so in a corporate environment. Its development and adoption responds to very carefully crafted economical and political interests.
Our stance is not against new technologies for the sake of it. We are not scribes resisting to the invention of the press. However, in a work environment, our responsibility as union representatives is making sure that any change in our working conditions results in a positive impact for workers. We strongly believe that this is not happening in this case.
Even assuming that the only intention of the company is the increase in productivity, and not to set the stage for costs cuts and layoffs, we will strongly oppose any negative consequence that the large scale AI adoption will have for workers, be it material (layoffs, salary decreases, etc.) or not material (higher stress levels, higher job insecurity, or any worsening of our mental health).
We therefore call for an open dialogue between the company and worker representatives in France, Spain, and the United States, where we can explore viable ways to prevent these negative consequences and avoid foreseeable labor conflicts.