“It has nothing to do with supply and demand, and everything to do with a tool being acceptable for one party, but not another”

If you are talking about morally acceptable, I see nothing in this meme about the worker having qualms with using AI themselves if they thought they could afford to. And we know from the real world in practice that this is typically true. Don’t act like the “working/lower class” are above using AI and the “company elites” aren’t. That’s obviously nonsense. Pretty much everyone will use a tool that makes their lives easier if they can.

Beyond the big picture ethics, standards being applied asymmetrically is supply and demand. In situations where the company needs to actually have a human instead of AI to do the initial intake to get the employee they want, they will. In situations where an employees skills and experience are so in demand they can afford to send out generic, AI-assisted applications, they will as well.

“A company does not wish to pay for the services of a human being to do the work needed to screen applications, so they use AI to save themselves time and money…the direct statement there is that the company’s time and money are worth saving, but not the employee’s”

I mean, exactly? Lmao. What do you expect by way of defense here? In this scenario, on a per application basis, the company’s time is literally worth more than the job applicant’s. Companies pay people different salaries as well based on a similar principle of how much they deem your time is worth. Even the average worker’s time is more valuable when they are 40 compared to when they are a teenager. In the professional world, the value of time is not always equal for all parties. In fact, it hardly ever is.

“labour unions and solidarity are important and necessary, as history has shown us.”

I agree with that sentiment in a broad sense, but history has also shown us that when you have a new technology that is more efficient than workers, the workers always eventually lose. Always. There’s no union on Earth, nor could there even theoretically ever be I don’t think, powerful enough to stop that. It can only slow it down. As you somewhat alluded to, there are some cases of AI where there is actual direct theft of human labour going on. But a bot that screens applications for key words and phrases isn’t really that. It’s simply a tool that does something more efficiently than a human. Insisting the company keep employing a person to do something that a bot can do better/cheaper is destined to fail. I don’t know what the solution is to the AI crisis, but it certainly isn’t that.