2026 is a scary time to work for a living.

Gone are the days of quiet quits, mass resignations, and highly visible union organizing struggles that began this decade and showed signs of: Perhaps the labor force was rising. Also in America. Instead, much of that momentum is being pushed over our heads by worries like a worsening affordability crisis, geopolitical instability, and the specter of artificial intelligence looming in the workplace.

For the CEOs of tech companies who are leading the AI ​​race and lining their pockets while vying for superiority, AI is no illusion, but a glittering unicorn. When AI is predicted just a few months away Can you do, or be able to do, everything a software engineer does? one day As they take over the CEO job, their excitement about the future is palpable. For the rest of us, it’s hard to have confidence in our thoughts. careless remark About “Some jobs will become obsolete, but many jobs will be created.” a 2025 Pew Survey It was found that “64% of Americans believe that AI will reduce jobs over the next 20 years,” which is perhaps why only 17% of Americans say AI will have a positive impact on the United States over the same period.

These uncertain times require scrutiny. Throughout 2026, The Guardian will publish Reworked, a thrilling and alarming reporting series that focuses on the human stakes as AI disrupts our workplaces. Like this essay, the stories in this series will focus not only on the realities and exaggerations of the hype around AI’s transformative potential, but also on the real-world power and plight of workers.

So what version of the future of work awaits us? The fact that it’s not decided yet means there’s still time to pivot.

resolution of division

Blue collar workers who have been working for many years Algorithmic monitoring and optimization People in the workplace are now worried that advances in technology will only make their jobs more impersonal. “[For] There are concerns that low-wage workers will be replaced by robots. However, there are also many concerns, including: changed to robots,” Lisa Kresge, a senior fellow at the Center on Labor at the University of California, Berkeley, told me.

And white-collar workers now wonder if their jobs will start to resemble blue-collar work. This is because they too will be tracked and managed as well, or they will need to switch to manual labor that is less likely to be taken over by AI.

It may seem like workers haven’t been this vulnerable in a long time. In a way, that’s true. But it’s also a pivotal moment, and one where something unexpected is happening. Collective social anxiety about AI is a catalyst for worker resistance.

“It’s creating opportunities,” 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, notice Their performance is tracked or undermined by the same logic as that of working-class warehouse pickers, and class divisions are erased to enable a larger working-class movement for dignity. That’s what we’re starting to see. ”

Just as the coronavirus pandemic has placed intense demands on front-line workers and blurred the lines between work and life for everyone else, people across all industries and income groups are feeling anxious and frustrated. These struggles prompted changes in power. At the same time that workers at Amazon warehouses and Starbucks stores across the U.S. led unionization efforts, mass retirements saw a record number of workers leave their jobs and those who remained in the workforce began bargaining for better pay and conditions.

“It was never a good time for a lot of workers, so part of the resurgence of labor organizing from that period was a response to a lot of fear,” Kresge said.

She also sees the rise of AI as a way for the labor movement to regain some of the power it lost after decades of attacks from employers. “I’m excited about the opportunity for technology to solve some of the problems that have been going on in our economy for decades in terms of how we treat workers and how we distribute rewards for productivity.”

perception of power

The situation for workers has been difficult for a long time. “Over time, unions have lost collective bargaining power, and a lot of that is due to a lack of the laws we need and law enforcement,” Mr. Gupta said. “For 40 years, wages have remained flat, productivity has increased, and unionization has reached historic lows.” By 2025, Only 9.9% of U.S. workers were union members. – Same percentage as in 2024, but still the lowest in nearly 40 years.

Today, with the advent of AI, the extreme imbalance of power between employers and employees has caught the world’s attention, leaving people exhausted. Even if the outcome is not yet determined, it is a glimmer of possibility in dark times.

AI is still an early technology. Many of the predictions about what it will enable and how it will change labor and the economy are just that: predictions. The question of worker power in the age of AI is still unsettled, even as billionaire CEOs with a vested interest in unregulated control of AI continue to imply that it is regulated.

“There is a concerted effort among many technology leaders to essentially create a mystique around AI as a tactic to disenfranchise workers, policy makers, and anyone else who is critical of the concentration of money and resources in society towards this goal,” Kresge told me.

In other words, you can’t just take what these billionaires say at face value. The rise of AI is already changing society, the economy, and our relationship to work, but many of these changes are predictive, based on our belief in the potential of the technology that is still being built.

“We have to constantly remind ourselves that the direction of technology is a choice. We can use AI to build a surveillance economy that extracts every drop of value from workers, or we can use AI to build an era of shared prosperity,” said Mr. Gupta. “We know that AI would be less of a threat if the technology was designed, deployed, and managed by the people doing the work.”