Shifting Landscape in Employment: Traditional Jobs May Become Obsolete
Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the workforce, but for many lower-income and less-skilled workers, the changes are causing complex challenges.
- Job Displacement and Loss
AI is automating entry-level and routine tasks, with the potential to displace up to 70% of some employees' tasks. While AI adoption is lower in low-income countries due to infrastructural limits, the impact is significant. Without proper re-skilling and social safety nets, many workers risk being left behind.
- Exploitation and Precarity
Lower-income workers often labour in informal sectors, making them vulnerable to exploitative practices. AI adoption can exacerbate these issues by enabling new forms of worker surveillance, control, or accelerating gig and contract work without protections.
- Threats to Dignity
The erosion of job security and collective bargaining power linked to AI-driven displacement and the informalization of work undermines workers’ dignity. Without organized labour support, many workers cannot seek redress or negotiate for better conditions, increasingly facing dehumanizing work environments.
- Differentiated Impact
AI's disruptive effects are not uniform. While some sectors and skills benefit from productivity augmentation and new job opportunities, these tend to benefit more skilled, educated workers, often leaving lower-skilled workers behind. Women, urban workers, and those with higher education show greater AI exposure, while many low-income workers remain less exposed but not necessarily safer due to informality and exploitation risks.
Addressing these issues requires strengthening labour institutions, promoting unionization, enforcing legal protections against exploitation, and facilitating re-skilling and social safety nets for displaced workers.
Elijah Clark, a consultant, states that CEOs are excited about AI due to its potential for efficiency and profitability. However, this focus on AI to cut jobs, as Clark notes, is not ten years in the future but happening right now. The question is whether AI will change what it means to be human, with warning signs of companies building systems to erase workers and an economy barreling ahead with no plan for absorbing the shock when work stops being the thing that binds us together.
Ai-jen Poo, president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, champions care work as a prime example of human-anchored work that technology cannot easily replace. Poo advocates for a fundamental rethinking of economic priorities, proposing a new foundation of safety net for workers that includes access to health care, paid time off, paid leave, affordable child care, affordable long-term care, and a raised minimum wage. The National Domestic Workers Alliance, led by Poo, is building tools to empower care workers, with the median income for home care workers currently standing at $22,000 per year.
Adrienne Williams, a former Amazon worker, describes the AI economy as a new era of forced labor due to invisible work done by individuals to train AI systems. The article suggests that choices need to be made to build laws with teeth, create strong safety nets, treat data labour as labour, and value work that cannot be automated, such as caring for each other and our communities.
Krystal Kauffman, a gig worker, has witnessed a shift from diverse tasks to a near-exclusive focus on data labeling and annotation in AI-related work. Kauffman sees hope in the growing movement of worker organizations pushing back against being kept at the bottom.
Peter Miscovich, JLL's Global Future of Work Leader, views AI as an accelerant of a trend that decouples headcount from real estate and revenue. Miscovich envisions future experiential workplaces that are highly amenitized and desirable.
The article emphasizes that we do not have much time to address these issues. The choices we make today will shape the future of work for lower-income workers, determining whether they will be left behind or given the opportunity to thrive in the AI-driven economy.
- The impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) on the workforce are creating complex challenges for lower-income and less-skilled workers, as AI is automating tasks that could displace up to 70% of some employees' tasks.
- The adoption of AI is exacerbating exploitation and precarity for lower-income workers, as it enables new forms of worker surveillance, control, and accelerates gig and contract work without protections.
- As AI displaces jobs and informalizes work, it is undermining the dignity of lower-income workers, making them more vulnerable to dehumanizing work environments without organized labour support to seek redress or negotiate for better conditions.
