In 2026, it’s a scary time to work for a living.
Gone are the days of quiet quits, great resignations, and highly visible union-organization battles that began the decade and signaled that perhaps worker power was increasing Again in America. Instead, much of that momentum is happening out of our minds due to concerns: the worsening affordability crisis, geopolitical instability, and the threat of artificial intelligence in the workplace.
For tech CEOs leading the AI race and enriching themselves while competing for dominance, AI is not an illusion at all, but a shining unicorn. When they predict that AI is just a few months away Being able to do everything a software engineer does, or will do one day Having assumed the CEO job, his enthusiasm for the future is evident. It’s hard for the rest of us to feel confident in them absurd comments About how “some jobs will become obsolete, but many jobs will be created”. A 2025 pew survey found that “64% of the public thinks AI will create fewer jobs over the next 20 years”, which is probably why only 17% of Americans say AI will have a positive impact on the US over the same time period.
In such uncertain times, scrutiny is required. Throughout 2026, the Guardian will publish Reworked, a reporting series that centers human interest as AI disrupts our workplaces in ways both thrilling and worrying. Like this essay, the stories in this series will focus on the real-world power and plight of workers, as well as the realities and hyperboles of the hype surrounding the transformative possibilities of AI.
So which version of the future of work awaits us? It has yet to be settled, which means there is still time to change course.
disintegrate partitions
Blue-collar workers, who have been struggling for a long time Algorithm Monitoring and Optimization At work, many now worry that technological advances will only make their jobs more dehumanizing. “(For low-wage workers, there is concern about being replaced by robots. But on the other hand, there is a lot of concern about having robots turned into Robots,’” Lisa Kresge, a senior researcher at the UC Berkeley Labor Center, told me.
And white-collar workers are now wondering whether their work will begin to resemble blue-collar labor – either because they will be tracked and managed similarly, or because they will need to switch to more manual work that is resistant to being taken over by AI.
It may seem that employees have not been this unsafe in a long time. In some ways, this is true. But this is also a critical moment, in which something unexpected is happening: Society’s collective anxiety over AI is driving workers to push back.
“This is creating an opportunity,” Sarita Gupta, vice president of Americas programs for the Ford Foundation and co-author of The Future We Need: Organizing for a Better Democracy in the Twenty-First Century, told me. “When you have a young Silicon Valley software engineer Understand That their performance is tracked or undermined by the same logic as a working class warehouse picker, class divisions are eliminated, and larger working class movements for respect become possible. “That’s what we’re starting to see.”
People across industries and income groups are worried and frustrated, just as they were when the COVID pandemic placed punishing demands on frontline workers and blurred the boundaries between work and life for everyone else. Those struggles prompted power shifts: At the same time that workers led unionization efforts at Amazon warehouses and Starbucks locations across the US, the Great Resignation saw record numbers of workers leave their jobs, and those who remained in the workforce began to negotiate for better pay and conditions.
Kresge said, “It was not a good time for a lot of workers. And the resurgence of labor organizing from that time was in response to a lot of fears.”
She also sees the rise of AI as an opportunity for the labor movement to regain some of the power it has lost after decades of attacks from employers. He said, “I’m optimistic about the opportunity for technology to lift some of the issues that have been going on in our economy for decades… around how workers are treated and how we’re distributing the rewards of productivity.”
perception of power
Conditions have remained difficult for workers for quite some time. “Over time, unions have lost collective bargaining power, and much of that is due to the lack of laws that we need to have and enforcement of the laws,” Gupta said. “For four decades, productivity rose while wages remained stagnant, and unionization reached historic lows.” In 2025, Only 9.9% of American workers were union members – Same percentage as 2024, but still the lowest number in nearly 40 years.
Today, the advent of AI is drawing the world’s attention to the extreme imbalance of power between employers and their employees – and people are upset. Even though the results are still uncertain, it is a glimpse of possibility in desperate times.
AI is still a budding technology. Many of the predictions about what it will be able to do and how it will change labor and the economy are just that – predictions. The question of worker power in the age of AI has not yet been decided, even if billionaire CEOs with a vested interest in AI’s unregulated dominance keep saying it has.
“There is a concerted effort being made among many tech leaders to create confusion about AI, fundamentally as a strategy to undermine workers, policymakers, and anyone critical of the increased concentration of money and resources toward this goal in our society,” Kresge told me.
In other words, take what these billionaires say with a grain of salt. The rise of AI is already changing society, the economy, and our relationship to work, but many of these changes are anticipated, based on our confidence in the potential of this still-evolving technology.
Gupta said, “We always have to remind ourselves that the direction of technology is a choice, right? We can use AI to create a surveillance economy that squeezes every drop of value out of a worker, or we can use it to build an era of shared prosperity.” “We know that if the technology were designed and deployed and controlled by working people, AI would not be such a threat.”
