While tech executives wax poetic about AI ushering in four-day workweeks and liberation from labor, economics guru Robert Reich is cutting through the drivel. In an ominous new essay, the former secretary of labor warns that those shortened weeks will also come with much shorter paychecks — leaving the working class scrambling for crumbs in order to survive.
The US economy is growing nicely, Reich notes, while the stock market is doing gangbusters. But as for the stuff that really counts for most Americans? It’s “sh*tty,” the plainspoken wonk asserts. And as AI continues to rankle the job market, Reich says the poor and working class will increasingly bear the brunt.
To set up his argument, Reich briefly considers comments from business tycoons like Zoom’s Eric Yuan and JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, who argue that four- and even three-day work weeks will become the norm thanks to new automation tools.
“All of this is pure rubbish,” Reich writes. “Here’s the truth: The four-day workweek will most likely come with four days’ worth of pay. The three-day workweek, with three days’ worth. And so on.”
As evidence, he references the productivity-pay gap, the measure of a society’s economic output compared to its wage growth. In the United States, productivity keeps going up — but the share of that productivity going to workers hasn’t really budged since the 1970s. Workers, in other words, have been getting shafted by their bosses for decades, and there’s no reason to think AI will change that.
“So, as AI takes over their current work, most workers will probably get poorer or have to take additional jobs to maintain their current pay,” Reich posits.
Indeed, we don’t need to wait for AI to take over to see this play out: full-time job growth in 2025 was almost nonexistent, while the number of people turning to gig work continues to rise amidst widespread layoffs and wage declines among low-wage workers.
“Rather than creating an age of abundance in which most people no longer have to worry about money,” Reich continues, “new technologies have contributed to a two-tiered society comprising a relatively few with extraordinary wealth and a vast number of people barely making it.”
At the end of the day, the economist says, “it comes down to who has the power.”
More on AI: Fear Grows That AI Is Permanently Eliminating Jobs
The post Economist Warns That the Poor Will Bear the Brunt of AI’s Effects on the Job Market appeared first on Futurism.
