2026 is a scary time to work for a living.
Gone are the days of quiet resignations, the Great Resignation, and the highly visible unionization battles that began the decade and signaled that maybe worker power was on the rise again in the United States. Instead, much of that momentum is being crowded out of our minds by anxieties: a deepening affordability crisis, geopolitical instability, and the specter of artificial intelligence looming over the workplace.
For tech CEOs leading the AI race and getting rich while fighting for dominance, AI is not a fantasy at all, but a glittering unicorn. When they predict that AI is in a few months to be able to do everything a software engineer does, or will do A day take over the CEO positions, their enthusiasm for the future is palpable. For the rest of us, it’s hard to trust them offhand remarks on the fact that “some jobs will be obsolete, but many jobs will be created”. A Pew 2025 survey found that “64% of the public believes AI will lead to fewer jobs over the next 20 years,” which likely explains why only 17% of Americans believe AI will have a positive effect on the United States over the same period.
Uncertain times like these require careful consideration. Throughout 2026, the Guardian will publish Reworked, a series of reports that focuses on human issues as AI disrupts our workplacesin a way that is both exciting and alarming. Like this essay, the stories in this series will focus on the power and struggles of workers in the real world, as well as the realities and exaggerations of the hype surrounding the transformative possibilities of AI.
So what version of the future of work awaits us? The issue is not yet settled, which means there is still time to change course.
Dissolve divisions
Blue-collar workers, who have long struggled with algorithmic monitoring and optimization at work, now fear that technological advances will only make their work more dehumanizing. “(For) low-wage workers, there is a fear of being replaced by robots. But on the other hand, there is a lot of fear of being replaced by robots. transformed into robots,” Lisa Kresge, a senior researcher at UC Berkeley’s Labor Center, told me.
And white-collar workers are now wondering whether their work will start to resemble that of blue-collar workers – either because they will be tracked and managed the same way, or because they will have to shift to more manual work that will resist AI domination.
It may seem like workers haven’t been this vulnerable in a long time. In a way, it’s true. But it’s also a pivotal moment, where something unexpected happens: society’s collective anxiety about AI prompts workers to respond.
“It creates an opportunity,” Sarita Gupta, vice president of U.S. programs at 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 software engineer from Silicon Valley realize As their performance is tracked or undermined by the same logic as that of a working-class warehouse picker, class divisions dissolve and greater labor movements for dignity are possible. This is what we are starting to see.
People across all industries and income brackets are anxious and frustrated, just as they were when the Covid pandemic placed harsh demands on frontline workers and erased the lines between work and life for everyone else. These struggles sparked shifts in power: just as workers led unionizing efforts in Amazon warehouses and Starbucks across the United States, the Great Resignation saw record numbers of employees walk out of their jobs, and those who remained in the workforce began to negotiate and win better wages and conditions.
“It wasn’t a very pleasant time for a lot of workers. And so part of the resurgence of unionizing from that period was a response to a lot of fears,” Kresge said.
She also sees the rise of AI as an opportunity for the labor movement to regain some of the power it lost after decades of attacks from employers. “I am hopeful that technology will have the opportunity to solve some of the problems that have existed in our economy for decades… in terms of the treatment of workers and the distribution of the fruits of productivity,” she said.
Perceptions of power
Conditions for workers have been difficult for a long time. “Over time, unions have lost their collective bargaining power, and a lot of that is due to the lack of laws we need and their enforcement,” Gupta said. “For four decades, productivity soared while wages remained stable and unionization reached historic lows.” In 2025, only 9.9% of American workers were unionized – the same percentage as in 2024, but still the lowest figures in almost 40 years.
Today, the advent of AI is drawing global attention to the extreme power imbalance between employers and their employees – and people are getting upset. Although the results are still undetermined, it remains a glimmer of possibility in these dark times.
AI is still an emerging technology. Most predictions about what it will be capable of and how it will transform work and the economy are just that: predictions. The question of worker power in the AI era has yet to be settled, even as billionaire CEOs with a vested interest in AI’s unregulated dominance continue to suggest that is the case.
“There is a concerted effort among many tech leaders to create a mystification around AI as a tactic, to a large extent, to disenfranchise workers, policymakers, and anyone else who might criticize the increasing focus of funding and resources in our society toward this goal,” Kresge told me.
In other words, take what these billionaires say with a grain of salt. The rise of AI is already transforming society, the economy and our relationship to work, but many of these changes are anticipated and based on our belief in the potential of a technology still under construction.
“We must always remember that the direction of technology is a choice, right? We can use AI to build a surveillance economy that extracts every drop of value from a worker, or we can use it to build an era of shared prosperity,” Gupta said. “We know that if the technology was designed, deployed and governed by those who do the work, AI would not pose such a threat.”