In 2026, it’s a scary time to work for a living.

Gone are the days of quiet quitting, the Great Resignation, and the highly visible union-organizing battles that began the decade and signaled that perhaps worker power was on the rise again in the US. Instead, much of that momentum is being crowded out of our minds by anxieties: a worsening affordability crisis, geopolitical instability, and the specter of artificial intelligence looming over the workplace.

For the tech CEOs leading the AI race and enriching themselves as they jostle for dominance, AI isn’t a phantasm at all, but a glimmering unicorn. When they predict AI is just months away from being able to do everything a software engineer does, or that it will one day take over CEOs’ jobs, their excitement for the future is palpable. For the rest of us, it’s hard to feel confident in their offhand remarks about how “some jobs will be obsolete, but many jobs will be created”. A 2025 Pew survey found that “64% of the public thinks AI will lead to fewer jobs over the next 20 years”, which is probably why only 17% of Americans say AI will have a positive effect on the US over the same time period.

Uncertain times like these call for scrutiny. Throughout 2026, the Guardian will publish Reworked, a reporting series that centers the human stakes as AI disrupts our workplaces, in ways both thrilling and alarming. Like this essay, the stories in this series will focus on workers’ real-world power and plights as well as the realities and exaggerations of the hype surrounding AI’s transformative possibilities.

So which version of the future of work awaits us? It is yet to be settled, which means there is still time to shift course.

Dissolving divisions

Blue-collar workers who have long grappled with algorithmic surveillance and optimization at work are now worrying that technological advancements will only make their jobs more dehumanizing. “[For] lower wage workers, there is concern about being replaced by robots. But on the other hand, there’s a lot of concern about being turned into robots,” Lisa Kresge, a senior researcher at the UC Berkeley Labor Center, told me.

And white-collar workers are now wondering if their work will begin to resemble blue-collar labor – either because they will be similarly tracked and managed, or because they will need to switch to more manual work that’s resistant to being taken over by AI.

It may seem that workers haven’t been this vulnerable in a long time. In some ways, that’s true. But this is also a pivotal moment, one in which something unexpected is happening: society’s collective anxiety over AI is catalyzing workers to push back.

“It is creating an opportunity,” Sarita Gupta, the Ford Foundation’s Vice President of US Programs 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 realize that their performance is tracked or undermined by the same logic as a working class warehouse picker, class divisions dissolve, and larger working-class movements for dignity are possible. That is what we’re starting to see.”

People across industries and income brackets are anxious and frustrated, quite like they were when the Covid pandemic placed punishing demands on frontline workers and erased 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 around the US, the Great Resignation saw a record number of employees quit their jobs, and the ones who remained in the workforce began negotiating for and gaining better pay and conditions.

“It was not a pretty time for a lot of workers. And so part of the resurgence of labor organizing from that period of time was in response to a lot of fears,” Kresge said.

She also sees the rise of AI as an opening for the labor movement to regain some of the power it’s lost after decades of attacks from employers. “I’m hopeful about the opportunity for technology to lift up some of the issues that have been under way in our economy for decades … in terms of how workers are treated and how we are distributing the rewards of productivity.”

Perceptions of power

Conditions for workers have been rough for a long while now. “Over time, unions have lost collective bargaining power, and a lot of that is due to the lack of laws that we need and enforcement of laws,” Gupta said. “For four decades, productivity soared while wages stayed flat, and unionization hit historic lows.” In 2025, only 9.9% of US workers were union members – the same percentage as 2024, but still the lowest numbers in almost 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 getting worked up. Even if the outcomes are still undetermined, that’s a glimmer of possibility in bleak times.

AI is still a nascent technology. Many of the predictions about what it will be capable of and how it will transform labor and the economy are just that – predictions. The question of worker power in the age of AI hasn’t been decided yet, even if billionaire CEOs with a vested interest in the unregulated dominance of AI keep implying that it has.

“There is a concerted effort among many tech leaders to basically create mystification around AI as a tactic, to a large extent, to disempower workers, policymakers, and anyone who might be critical of the growing concentration 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 a lot of these shifts are anticipatory, based on our belief in the potential of a technology that’s still being built.

“We have to always remind ourselves that the direction of technology is a choice, right? We can use AI to build 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,” Gupta said. “We know if technology were designed and deployed and governed by the people doing the work, AI wouldn’t be such a threat.”