AI must be addressed as a labor issue, and workers should be part of decision-making in AI policy. Moving beyond common AI tropes and assumptions of mass job displacement, we seek a deeper understanding of how AI is reshaping the value of work, workplace conditions, underlying business models and ultimately, power relations.
Labor Futures
We interrogate how technology is disrupting, destabilizing, and transforming many aspects of work and employment.
Team Members
About
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 — or outright dismiss — how technologies impact workers, sidelining and disempowering them and further entrenching racial, gender, and economic oppression.
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 problems. 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.
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.
Recent Work
Mentions and Press
All Work
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Academic Article
Cornell University, ILR SchoolSeptember 2025 -
Academic Article
Friedrich Ebert StiftungApril 2024 -
Academic Article
Journal of SociologyFebruary 2024 -
Academic Article
Feminist ReviewSareeta Amrute reframes the narrative around digital laborers to grapple with how we might best protect them. Read on Feminist ReviewDecember 2019 -
Academic Article
Columbia Law ReviewRyan Calo and D&S researcher Alex Rosenblat write this analysis of the newly termed 'taking economy' of Uber. Sharing economy firms such as Uber and Airbnb facilitate trusted transactions between strangers on digital platf... Read on Columbia Law ReviewMarch 2017 -
Academic Article
SSRND&S Affiliates Ifeoma Ajunwa, Kate Crawford, and Jason Schultz examine the effectiveness of the law as a check on worker surveillance, given recent technological innovations. This law review article focuses on popular trend... Read on SSRNMarch 2016 -
Academic Article
Feminist Media StudiesIn this commentary, D&S fellow Karen Levy's considers the gendered dimensions of shifting cultures of work in response to the growing demands of the technologized/mediated workplace. She also explores the impact of new digi... Read on Feminist Media StudiesFebruary 2016