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AI Won’t Reduce Your Workweek, Productivity Has Never Helped the Working Class

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A sketch of a protest scene. Signs read "healthcare is a human right," "we need clean water and air," "the rent is too damn high," "keep AI off my art," "we can't afford groceries," and "wages are too low." It's in front of a large skyscraper with a sign that reads, "We don't care, go away."

When have corporations cared about us?

Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, that’s why I poop on company time. But to quote a response, that was a rhyme from a better time, and that time was a long time ago. Because in 1965, it was already out of date. The average CEO earned 21 times more than the average worker. Today, they make 290 times more. And, if you work for a fortune 500 corporation, over 600 times more. For certain companies, the CEO is paid thousands of times more than their employees. For example, at Starbucks, workers make $15,000 so the CEO can get $95,800,000. A one time payment of the Starbuck’s CEO’s salary would set me up for life, but personally, I’d rather my workers receive more pay, if I was in his shoes.

Does your CEO do 600 times the work you do? No. Are they 600 times more productive than you? No.

AI CEOs and their supporters have repeatedly claimed that, once AI replaces you, companies will pay into taxes that the government will dole out to citizens, a process called “universal basic income,” or “UBI.” But why would they? Have corporations ever rewarded increases in productivity with shorter workweeks or more pay? Companies haven’t supported their workers, even when it could increase productivity. Control and profits for those at the top have always been far more important than compensating or caring for workers.

Workers have grown in productivity with improvements to technology and access to education. Working from home and even shorter work weeks can improve productivity. Productivity has greatly outpaced wage increases, which remain stagnant. So why would profits from laying us off in exchange for AI change anything? Why even lay us off for those profits if the intention is to take that saved money and put it into UBI? This logic makes no sense. Increasing profit never made corporations or wealthy capitalists generous before, why would it start now?

AI-forward corporations insist that AI will become a tool that allows workers to work less. They’re either lying or stupid, and I’m guessing they’re only hoping you’re stupid. We get better and better at producing and the wealth-hoarding class just keep taking. These people will not suddenly start caring about your well-being once they can replace your labor with AI.

Productivity Up, Inflation Up, Wages Down

Workers are more productive than ever. Thanks to technology, education, and even working conditions, employees are doing more with their hours than ever. That’s translating to massive profits that workers aren’t seeing. Trickle-down economics doesn’t work, and wages not only haven’t kept up with inflation or productivity, they have remained stagnant. The federal minimum wage in the United States hasn’t changed in decades, and no where in the United States can a person afford a single bedroom apartment on minimum wage.

If wages kept up with productivity, the minimum wage would be closer to $26 dollars an hour today. Instead, the federal minimum wage in the United States hasn’t changed since 2009, when it was set to $7.25. It’s less than a third of what it should be. In 2010, Citizen’s United allowed corporations to funnel unlimited money into elections. The United States has always been vested in corporate interests, but that marked a dramatic shift in the government. Corporations that have kept worker wages stagnant while inflating executive wages now have influence on politics, far greater than your own. While that may not be the only reason for our stagnant wages, or even a reason, it certainly happened around a suspicious freeze in the wages of Americans. Now the leaders of those corporations are saying you’ll be safe when they replace your work with AI. They can’t even pay people a living wage when we’re working for them, what will they do when they don’t even need you?

Where’s the 4-Day Workweek?

Whenever I hear things like, “AI will help you work less because you’ll be more productive,” I think about how working less is already more productive. Every study on the four day workweek for office work has shown dramatic improvements in productivity, lower costs, and reduced CO2 emissions, along with drastically improved employee satisfaction, mental, and even physical health. Plus, having four days working, three days resting means you have more time for your passions. More time to learn how to make things, create art, or just spend more time with the people you love. It’s a win for everyone, right?

So why don’t we have it everywhere? Even “more progressive” companies I’ve worked for have resisted it. Microsoft found a 40% increase in productivity when they tested it in Japan, with a 23% reduction in electricity costs and 60% fewer pages printed. It saves money, time, and workers work harder because they’re more rested, wasting less time in long meetings due to the condensed schedule, and have more time to pursue interests, which may involve education that further helps their work. I learn more in my time between jobs than I ever learn on the job. I’ve learned new programming languages, gotten much better at playing guitar, made apps and games, all during my time off between jobs. I’m better at my job now because of the time off I had when I was unemployed. That extra day could turn into something that helps skill growth and career advancement.

But that’s likely the problem, isn’t it? When workers are happier and can pursue more things they’re interested in, they’re more difficult to control. They could move careers more easily. Sure, the four day workweek does increase retention, but only as long as other companies aren’t doing it. If someone could leave to pursue a passion the picked up in their time off, you’d lose them. Or, what if now that they’re not so broken from working all week, they’re more willing to organize? That could lead to unions and better healthcare, benefits, and pay. That could reduce profits or executive pay in the long run. Happier employees might balance the scales, and those at the top fear that more than anything else.

If it means losing control or potentially paying workers more, corporations aren’t interested. If AI could improve productivity—and studies show it does the opposite—you still couldn’t expect to make more money or have more time. These corporations could give you that time and increase their profits right now, but out of interest in controlling their laborers, we don’t have a large-scale push for a four-day workweek. Companies won’t make a single change to improve your productivity now in part because of how much it might benefit your interests against their own. Yet again, we have to ask ourselves, why would replacing workers with AI change that?

WFH Increases Productivity Too

Another perfect example of productivity taking a backseat to control is the rejection of work from home as the COVID-19 pandemic became endemic. WFH lead to increases in productivity, especially in jobs like software engineering, that have always benefited from a more distraction-free workplace. Those productivity increases did not get shared with the employees who made them.

“The productivity gains accrued to businesses, however, did not result in increased compensation to workers.”

– Sabrina Wulff Pabilonia and Jill Janocha Redmond, “The rise in remote work since the pandemic and its impact on productivity,” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Work from home is far from perfect. It doesn’t universally improve performance in all jobs, and doesn’t even work for others. In some cases, it can worsen performance, depending on the employee and the working condition. The correct response would be to let teams and individuals decide what works best for their themselves, as it could differ between departments, individuals, and teams. But in-office work yields more control for middle and upper management, as well as higher observability. It also uses office space, and real estate is a prime investment for the capitalist class, who wouldn’t want to see values reduced and also are in charge of whether or not a company will support WFH or hybrid work models. There’s a conflict of interest, and often personal gain wins out for executives, not employee comfort or productivity.

Meanwhile, workers have little incentive to care about productivity. We don’t get to see the benefits from it. Even if working in an office was universally more productive for everyone—and it doesn’t seem to be—the labor of a commute, preparing meals or ordering lunch, stressful and noisy working environment, reduced sleep, and other unpaid labor just isn’t worth the effort for workers. We give far more than we get. Why put in more effort? When productivity goes up, either through new technologies or working from home or on-site, we reap no reward, so why increase productivity anyway?

The Least Productive Employee Makes the Most Money

Workers who found themselves working from home due to the Covid-19 pandemic realized they were far more productive at home and could actually keep up with a decent output while working two or more jobs. Some, certainly, over-extended themselves and performed poorly, but plenty of others held down two jobs without being noticed. This was called “overemployment,” and companies fired employees caught working more than one full-time job this way.

But CEOs do it all the time. Maybe that’s because CEOs don’t work as demanding of roles as they want you to think they do.

Many Americans need to work multiple part-time jobs. Software engineers often have their own side projects bringing in more money too. We’re all trying to make up for the fact that wages don’t pay us enough anymore. However, CEOs like Elon Musk hold down multiple CEO positions. Many others are on boards or advisory roles at other corporations. CEOs can have as many jobs as they want, all while making millions or even billions for their role that, apparently, doesn’t take up all of their time.

It sounds like they’re woefully inefficient.

Meanwhile, CEOs make far more than the workers creating value for their companies. The wage gap between CEOs and workers has grown absurdly large. At Starbucks the pay ratio gap between the CEO and employees is 6,666:1. That’s $6,666 for every $1 an employee gets. The CEO made $95.8 million in a year while the average worker earned less than $15k. That’s an extreme example, but across all industries, CEOs make over 600 times what their employees make. In 2024, it was 632:1. In 2019, that was 560:1. CEOs are rapidly widening the pay gap, all while wages have remained stagnant.

A company without its workers shuts down immediately, but your CEO can take month-long vacations or hold down three different jobs without their absence being noticed, so if productivity is so important, why the gap in pay? It’s almost as though hoarding money is more important to rich capitalists than compensating the working class. Workers aren’t fairly compensated when corporations need us, why would it change when they don’t?

AI Job Cuts Already Happening

A kind of cute robot guy with a nametag asks, "So, uh, are you gonna buy that or...?"

Who needs salespeople when AI knows all your details?

For the second year in a row, when the holidays were coming, Coke leaned on AI instead of paying real humans to make their iconic ad. The slop they churned out was awful, but it didn’t stop them from choosing the cheapest route, jobs be damned.

Coke’s far from alone. When you know the signs to look for, such as strange artifacts, blurry edges, lack of consistency between shots, and fast shots, you’ll start to notice a lot more AI. Sometimes commercials only use AI in the background or for certain shots. Every time they do it though, it cuts down on quality in exchange for not requiring as many employees or paying them as much. It’s not as though these companies are going out of their way to pay for the displaced workers or increase the pay of those picking up the slack still at the company; they’re hoarding those profits, and will continue to do so.

Outside of advertising, you’ve surely found unhelpful AI support agents. Every single time your email is answered by An AI rather than a human, you’re getting a worse response that likely just came straight from a company’s FAQ page that you already read. I recently was trying to get details on the privacy policy from Notability app creator Ginger Labs, only to get the run-around from the AI support for days before finally a human chimed in to answer my questions about possible inconsistencies I found in their privacy policy. The human was immediately helpful, unlike the AI trash responses they spammed me with beforehand.

I know people who work support. Most of them are management now, but they started answering phones and emails like everyone else did. They got to management by proving themselves at the job and understanding what it takes to help others do the job well. However, that’s not something that happens if you replace most—if not all—of those entry-level positions to replace them with AI agents. There’s no getting into a career if the start of the career ladder is chopped off.

Duolingo replaced people with AI for translations and practice sentences. Numerous people found errors, questioning if AI was to blame, and many others pledged to cancel their subscriptions. Duolingo faced significant backlash, surprising the CEO who laid off so many workers, but the company stuck with their decision, and has not hired contractors back. Those jobs are gone because someone decided that half-decent is better than good when it comes so cheap. We’re making everything worse so capitalists can get richer.

They’ll Feed Us Because They Need Us!

A robot face in front of a bunch of faces with zippers over their mouths. The text reads "Don't worry, everything is fine."I’d love to buy a new MacBook Pro right now. Frustratingly, I need an Apple silicon Mac to run Nightshade, and I want to start poisoning the AI well. But, they’re extremely expensive. Plus, I might want to swap it out for the rumored M6 MacBook Pro by the end of the year for that touchscreen, if Apple doesn’t ruin it by taking out all the ports or something ridiculous.

If I just had the money, I’d do it! So why don’t corporations pay me more? If they pay me more, I can buy more! Surely they have incentive to just pay everyone more. Corporations have a stranglehold on U.S. politics, they could push for an increase the federal minimum wage. We could raise it to $26/hour, retaining the purchasing power Americans used to have when minimum wage better reflected our productivity. It would replace a wage that can’t even allow a worker to rent an apartment anywhere in the U.S. Meanwhile, such a wage hike would likely not cause job loss or an increase in inflation. That more equitable minimum wage would send ripples through industries that will lead to increases in wages for everyone. Plus, if we make more money, we buy more! It stands to reason that if corporations want more money, they should make us all rich, right? Perhaps we should get a $100/hour minimum wage!

Ridiculous, I know, at least for now. But why do we lose track of that ridiculousness when discussing universal basic income (UBI) for people these very corporations replaced with AI? We know AI doesn’t do the work as well as humans, it just costs less. So if they’re solely interested in reducing those labor costs, why would they make up for it in taxes that lead to the same amount of stability and growth potential that the replaced worker could get on the job?

They Don’t Need to Sell To You

Workers aren’t the only potential consumers corporations target. Are you paying to fly Elon Musk to Mars? Buy a yacht recently? How many floors of a NYC skyscraper do you own? If capitalists no longer need labor and no longer need the working class to make money, they won’t need to sell to you either. If profit can exist in greater measure without the labor of the working class, and it can also be sold without the purchasing power of the working class, why would they pay a class that can’t generate the same profit as those with more wealth and power? Sure, there will still be a market and products for lower classes, but you’ll not have the same purchasing power because there just isn’t enough of a motivation to provide such a large sum of money to a class that may not purchase your goods.

Obviously not all industries will abandon the working class, but you’ve already witnessed it happening. Food prices outpacing inflation. Rent skyrocketing as landlords prefer empty spaces to lowering rental values. Fast fashion replacing mid-ranged clothing that lasts longer but costs a little more. You can’t get a half-decent phone or computer for less than $1,000. Prices of everything are leaning towards luxury, with the working class simply asked to go into debt to afford them or make due with the cheapest goods. You’re having a harder time buying items because the mid-range is out. Once upon a time you could buy a plastic MacBook, or an iPod Shuffle, instead of the aluminum MacBook Pro or iPod Video. Products are leaning towards “luxury,” with the middle ground losing out and fewer options on the low-end. This year, due to RAM price increases, largely due to AI, you may pay more for a phone that has less. We’re losing value of everything to AI.

Without a solid income, you’ll buy what you can and rent, lease, or finance what you cannot, just like you always have. If there’s greater profit to be found in providing only luxury goods that force users into debt, why would corporations waste money investing in the production of less profitable goods? Corporations aren’t going to back giving you UBI just to ensure you can maybe spend some cash on their goods when they can just as easily sell to those who don’t require UBI for purchases for much more money, asking you to enter a cycle of endless debt to afford it. After all, what’s a 50-year mortgage or a 72-month car loan to someone who will be in debt for the rest of their life no matter what they do?

We’ve Already Seen What Happens to Those Who Can’t Work

Disability rights advocates often point out that it’s the only minority group you can join at any time and, due to aging, likely will. But it’s because of this that so few people want to think about this group. The dread that comes from the idea of losing your autonomy, health, or life, often leads to people not thinking about how dangerous driving a car is, how important yearly checkups are, or just what they want done with their body after they die. We avoid topics like this, but I want to turn your attention to it, because we already see what happens to people when they can’t work. What happens when corporations don’t need a group of people for profitability. The disabled community, especially those who either rely on or are trapped in disability payments from the government, paint a drastic picture about how they not only lose their autonomy, they also lose their right to marry, their ability to find work, and more.

We’ll treat people who can’t work due to their skills being replaced by AI as poorly as we treat those who can’t work due to disability. We trap people in poverty for their disabilities, we avoid accessible design, like elevators at every train station, public transit, wide sidewalks, increased visibility in intersections, ramps, renovations, or even our money design. I’ve had to push just to get a little time to develop accessible features for apps before, despite it only taking a few days of work and it opening apps up to a much larger group of people with different needs. In every way, we screw over the disabled community. That’s exactly what people who are pushed out of employment due to AI takeovers of their work will find for themselves.

When capitalism doesn’t need you, it discards you. We see it every day and so often look away instead of confronting the issues and demanding a better world for everyone. People thank their gods for not being in a position that requires the conscientiousness of others, all while ensuring that if or when they ever end up in that position, the aid they’ll find will be scarce and unhelpful.

AI Leaders Insist You’ll Be Fine

Despite failing to pay you for productivity increases, insure your health, keep you secure during periods of disability or unemployment, AI company leadership wants you to know that this time they’ll take care of you. This time they won’t pull the football away, Charlie Brown, honest!

Elon Musk, who suggested his employees sleep in the office to work late and counted the lines of code they contributed, swears that UBI will take off just as soon as AI can replace you. His xAI company that makes the Grok chatbot is counting on being able to replace you, after all.

“Trouble with UBI is that either it’s going to cost an amount that’s beyond what I expect to be politically possible in the next several decades, or it’s going to be way inadequate.”

– Paul Krugman, Nobel-winning economist

Meanwhile, Sam Altman questions whether or not any job replaced by AI was “real work” anyway. Also, when asked, “How will people survive,” in relation to AI replacing our jobs, Altman replied, “I don’t know, neither does anybody else.” Even while these AI executives swear everything will be fine, solutions will be found, or that UBI will be extravagant, they admit they don’t actually know how to keep people alive when the system we’ve been forced to work within runs out of usefulness for us while economists point out that UBI likely will be far too expensive to meet our needs. They aren’t concerned about solving these problems. They’re rich and nothing will change that. You, on the other hand, likely aren’t, and no one’s actually thinking about your needs.

AI Will Be Deadly, If it Isn’t Already

A haunting robot sketch representing AI with the text "Fill me for I am empty" around it. The eyes, nose, mouth, and ears are cavernous into a foreboding metal shapeWe’re more productive than ever, yet working more and making less. AI won’t save you, it’ll kill you. Not through some Skynet-inspired nightmare. It’ll be far more insidious. In a world of inflation and unemployment, you’ll make nothing, you’ll own nothing, and you’ll scrape what you can together to get by. You’ll work whatever jobs you can get. Passions, art, all will have to take a step back. Art can’t survive when you’re in survival mode. AI feeds you “art” to consume anyway, right? Just keep scrolling.

We’re getting close to this dire soulless world already. How many artists do you know who can make art their full-time career? Musicians can’t even get paid a living wage and people still won’t ditch the platform that pays them so little for streaming their art. I know quite a few musicians. Not one can make music their entire career, despite its importance in most people’s lives and millions of plays on streaming services. And yet, every software engineer I know can find gainful employment, despite many of them not doing great work or not contributing to humanity. We make for the sake of profit, and we’ve made human needs, including creativity and art, commodities to be automated.

AI does not create art, it regurgitates what’s already been made in new, half-digested ways. Nothing AI makes is new. AI represents stagnation, permanent beige forever. We will not be a species that creates if we do not protect creativity. What is humanity without creativity? Profitable, sure, but will it have its soul?

When AI has taken your job, your art, your passions, and left you poor and destitute, scraping what you can together to pay off debt, the corporations that made a fortune from replacing you with that AI won’t need you unless you can make them more profitable. How will you do that? Your healthcare comes with conditions, you likely have to get it from work or have enough money to pay for it yourself. You’re attached to your job through your very health. Do you really think the industry that does that is going to take pity on you when AI has left you unemployable and simply give you money without conditions? Why on earth would the people who profit from exploitation suddenly change their tune when you have nothing to give them, when they already treat us so poorly when they need our labor? AI is a tool of capitalists to replace labor, and unless you make your money by having money already, you’re not going to benefit from it, no matter what some rich asshole tries to tell you.

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