Let's Not Confuse Labor's Problems with White-Collar AI Doomerism
Labor is facing an existential crisis, but AI is not the source of it.
When a comedian like Tim Dillon claims “There’s an ancient Sumerian god that Sam Altman and Peter Thiel are communicating with, and they’re going to give birth to an AI demon,” I tend to believe him because the claim is a self-conscious exaggeration, and like any good exaggeration, it indirectly harbors an uncomfortable truth. But more often in AI discourse, the exaggeration is presented directly as the truth, and this is justified by the supposed qualitative social break that AI technology represents.
Take Hamilton Nolan’s recent piece “An Existential Threat to Organized Labor’s Ability to Help People” (hint: it’s AI!). Here’s the key takeaway:
The progress of the AI industry is in effect shrinking the sphere of economic life in which unions might even hope to be able to help humans. At some point that sphere will become too small to matter to most humans.
Nolan is understandably concerned that those in his own profession—writing—may eventually find themselves replaced by the very AI models that their work helped train. But he also adds:
This is not just about writers. Not even close. It is about architects and lawyers and scientists and teachers and a whole host of other fields that are facing the same dynamic. The basic threat of white collar job automation by AI has been understood for a long time. But I do not think that organized labor itself—all of the labor unions in America today, the ones still able to exercise power on their own little industrial islands—has really begun to reckon with what we are up against.
So what, then, is the solution to this impending obsolescence of labor unions? “I don’t have the answer here,” Nolan admits. “But we had better get our fucking thinking caps on, fast.”
Indeed! But while racing down to my local haberdashery, I did take note of the fact that while Nolan is not simply talking about writers, he is almost exclusively focused on white-collar work. The professions he mentions—writers, architects, scientists, teachers, lawyers, designers, PhDs—all roughly participate in the “knowledge” economy, and while he does add the perfunctory “and a whole host of other fields that are facing the same dynamic,” it’s difficult to know what’s being included beyond this specific set of occupations. But what precisely is included in the AI apocalypse grab bag is actually quite important: if we just go by the professions he lists, his claim that AI is “shrinking the sphere of economic life in which unions might even hope to be able to help humans” to a point where it’s “too small to matter to most humans” implies that white-collar workers represent the vast majority of organizable workers, and that in making them obsolete, AI is also making unions as such obsolete. The Teamsters and the building trades might have something to say about this!
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2025 “Professional and related occupations”, which include most of the jobs mentioned by Nolan, accounted for 25.7% of total wage and salary earners in the United States. Let’s imagine a 30% reduction in the number of these jobs in the next decade due to AI, a figure that’s in the range of what many different business analysts are predicting. If that 30% reduction were to take place today, holding constant the 14.7% unionization rate in that occupational category, there would be 1.65 million less union members, bringing union density from 10% to 8.9%.
That is undeniably bad. But the question is if it constitutes an event horizon for organized labor, and the answer is clearly no.
