Labor Futures

Public debates about the future of work are often shaped by hype cycles and industry-driven narratives about the inevitability of tech innovation. Yet these narratives can obscure critical questions about how technologies materially impact workers lives, sidelining and disempowering them. The Labor Futures program aims to move beyond these narratives to interrogate how technology is disrupting, destabilizing, and transforming many aspects of work and employment.

What We Do

Our work challenges the assumption that workers are merely passive recipients of technology, and that automation is the solution to a wide range of complex social and economic problem. Through rigorous empirical research and targeted engagement with stakeholders and decision-makers, we aim to create opportunities and levers for workers to shape the technologies that impact their everyday lives. We investigate critical labor topics to shift narratives, expand debate, and inform policy and practice.

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Our Work

Over the years, our work has explored the role of digital worker surveillance and algorithmic inequality, how the tech industry and corporate power are reshaping the economic and political landscapes of labor, and how precarious gig platform models erode labor rights and workplace standards. Today, we focus our attention on applied research, and are pursuing new research on rapid developments in AI and its impact on labor. We are also introducing research that complicates conversations about the future of work by examining issues at the intersection of labor, race, and technology.

Explore our series on generative AI and labor

Focus Areas


AI, Automation, and Labor

AI must be addressed as a labor issue, and workers should be part of decision-making on AI policy. Moving beyond common AI tropes and assumptions of mass job displacement or augmentation, we seek a deeper understanding of the everyday effects of AI on workplace responsibilities and conditions — as well as how AI shapes underlying business models and social and power relations.

Labor, Race, and Technology

Motivated by critical gaps in research, policy, and public discourse, we build interdisciplinary conceptual bridges between the worker justice and racial justice movements that affirm their shared values, while adding nuance and cultural context to the public discourse about the future of work— with the goal of shaping policy and practice for the betterment of all workers.

Connecting Research, Policy, and Action

Realizing that our mission will take more than research, we explore how this knowledge can be applied to real world situations. By fostering relationships with external partners and stakeholders, we endeavor to contribute to opportunities for workers to organize, create policy, and influence the development of technology.


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