Union organizers are growing increasingly worried about a future in which AI-powered robots decimate blue collar labor.
When past generations imagined the best version of the future, it was one of leisure. Advertisements, cartoonists, and pulp novelists dared us to dream of a world where the spoils of industrial development were shared with all: robot butlers, transit by pneumatic tube, and more familiar tropes. These developments, it seemed, would make our lives more convenient, more secure, and — dare we say — more abundant.
Now in 2026, it’s clear that even the most modest utopian fantasies have been stolen by the wealthy. The rich have luxurious self-driving cars while the rest of us suffer with crumbling public transit. The rich treat housing as an asset, while the rest of us navigate algorithms meant to maximize rent extraction. The rich have elite private schools, while the rest of us content ourselves to teacher shortages and glitchy AI tutors.
Going forward, the disparity is likely to widen. Having established their giddy desire to automate white collar jobs, tech moguls are increasingly turning their attention toward the trades — jobs which were, rhetorically at least, seen as a safe haven against AI’s rising tide.
