On May 1, much of the world celebrates International Workers’ Day, or May Day, to honor workers’ rights and the history of the union movement. A holiday in many countries, May Day has traditionally been suppressed in the United States, a nation that has never been very important in either international labor solidarity or workers’ rights.
The United States and its northern neighbor, Canada, instead celebrate their own unique Labor Day in September. But the origins of May Day lie in the United States itself, where, on May 1, 1886, mass strikes in favor of an eight-hour work day broke out and were quickly met with a deadly police crackdown.
Today, workers’ rights are under fire from another direction: artificial intelligence (AI), which threatens workers’ very right to, well, work.
In January, Amazon – the second-largest employer in the United States after Walmart – moved to lay off 16,000 employees, the latest round of widespread layoffs over AI. In October 2025, The New York Times reported that the company had plans to “replace more than half a million jobs with robots.”
The United States currently leads the world in the development of AI, which is not surprising given the country’s special relationship with staunch capitalism and the idea that workers must act like machines. What more logical next step than replacing them with machines?
I myself generally try to avoid America at all costs, as I found it quite creepy and alienating long before the AI takeover. On a recent trip to San Francisco, the world’s leading AI and technology hub, I discovered that the landscape had become increasingly dystopian due to the ubiquitous billboards and other billboards shoving AI down everyone’s throats.
He was in town visiting a young Colombian he had met in the Darien Gap, the deadly migratory crossroads of the Americas, as he headed north in search of the American dream or at least enough money to survive. I was now working in construction in the San Francisco Bay Area, a profession I believed was immune to AI disruption, but the Internet informed me I was wrong.
Driving into town, it was hard to see a billboard promoting anything other than AI. A local ad campaign, courtesy of San Francisco-based AI agency Artisan, had repeatedly made headlines for its overtly insensitive nature. The company’s signs offered a variety of advice: “Stop hiring humans”; “The era of AI employees is here”; and “Artisans won’t complain about work-life balance.”
Artisan CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, 24, has been quoted defending the campaign as intentionally “provocative” and suggesting that his company’s goal was not actually as inhumane as it seemed: “We’re looking to replace the work that people don’t want to do so they can do the work that they actually enjoy.”
But unfortunately for Carmichael-Jack, there is such a thing as reality. And for many people in the real world, a job is often a means to put food on the table and cover the basic necessities of existence, an increasingly formidable task, especially in a country that would rather finance the genocide in Gaza and the war against Iran rather than provide affordable housing and healthcare options to its own people.
In other words, the average Amazon worker who loses their job due to AI is unlikely to spontaneously find themselves doing something they “enjoy” (like, I don’t know, being the 24-year-old CEO of an AI agency in California).
As Liza Featherstone, author of Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Walmart, told me: “The billionaire class seeks a world without workers, or at least one in which workers feel as alien and precarious as possible. They love AI because they don’t want to deal with human workers’ demands to be treated like…humans!”
Without a doubt, precarious employment is an intrinsic component of capitalism, as workers who live in fear of losing their jobs are less likely to defend their rights.
Just look at the recent sordid history of corporate union busting by companies like Amazon, Starbucks, and Trader Joe’s, which have relied on patently illegal and underhanded tactics, such as firing pro-union workers and threatening to withhold health benefits from employees who don’t join the anti-union line.
And fear in the workplace will no doubt only intensify as “AI employees” who don’t care about rights start snatching up jobs left and right.
In the end, AI is not just the culmination of long-standing corporate efforts to turn Earth’s inhabitants into digitally addicted automatons. It is also the culmination of a long corporate history of labor oppression.
Just for the hell of it, I Googled “issues with AI” to see what AI Overview’s answer was. According to the response I received, the issues ranged from “immediate technical failures and ethical dilemmas to long-term social and security risks.”
By early 2026, the summary specified, “key issues” included the “tendency to generate false information, perpetuate biases, and cause substantial risks to the environment and data security.”
Of course, none of this has stopped corporate plutocrats from betting on AI. On April 29, The New York Times revealed that in the first three months of this year alone, Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft had “invested a total of $130.65 billion in capital expenditures, much of it spent on data centers that power AI.”
Meanwhile, certain elite executives have pointed out that AI currently costs much more than human workers. But those trivialities don’t matter.
For his part, US President Donald Trump is all about AI, and a White House press release in March announced that the Trump administration is “committed to winning the AI race to usher in a new era of human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security for the American people.”
But it goes without saying that there is little room for human flourishing in a posthuman world. And on this May Day, like any other day, there should be no place for AI.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
