UnitedHealth Tracking if Workers Use AI Each Day; Meta Axes 20,000 this Week; Customer Service Jobs Down 130,000 in a Year; EU Workers Get Mandatory AI/Layoff Consultation Rights — US Workers Get None

IMF says AI is shrinking the middle class; 134,000 tech jobs gone this year; Upwork fires the workers it sells work to; Citi cutting 20,000; two CEOs soften their AI Jobpocalypse story before they IPO

The Middle Class Is the Target The International Monetary Fund does not typically frame its research in personal terms. Its January 2026 “Staff Discussion Note” on AI and new job creation [https://www.imf.org/en/publications/staff-discussion-notes/issues/2026/01/09/bridging-skill-gaps-for-the-future-new-jobs-creation-in-the-ai-age-572136] does. https://www.imf.org/en/publications/staff-discussion-notes/issues/2026/01/09/bridging-skill-gaps-for-the-future-new-jobs-creation-in-the-ai-age-572136The IMF finds that in regions with higher demand for AI-related skills, employment levels are 3.6% lower in occupations that are highly exposed to AI but offer limited scope for human-AI complementarity. The workers absorbing those losses are in entry-level and middle-skilled roles. Listen on Apple Podcasts [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ai-labor-report/id1896663061] About one in ten job vacancies in advanced economies now demands at least one new AI-related skill [https://www.imf.org/en/blogs/articles/2026/01/14/new-skills-and-ai-are-reshaping-the-future-of-work]. Those vacancies pay more. The jobs that do not require new AI skills are paying less and disappearing faster. So, AI skill premiums benefit workers at the top of the wage distribution. Workers at the bottom are also benefiting indirectly through service consumption. The group in between absorbs the displacement without capturing the gains. That group is the middle class. The IMF is an institution that chooses its words carefully. It used the phrase “contributing to the shrinking of the middle class” in a published research note. JPMorgan Just Put $40 Million on the Table for the Workers the IMF Is Describing Jamie Dimon arrived at a similar conclusion through a different route. In March, the JPMorgan CEO declared that the American Dream was “slipping out of reach for too many people.” This week JPMorgan published details of a $40 million small-business investment program [https://fortune.com/2026/05/27/jamie-dimon-american-dream-jpmorganchase-40-million-small-business/]. The program routs grants through community development financial institutions toward the communities his bank’s own data identifies as falling behind. JPMorgan’s own research finds that fewer than 10% of new businesses reach $1 million in revenue within five years. The structural disadvantage is concentrated among founders who lack inherited wealth or strong professional networks. The Freelance Economy’s Version of Work Degradation The online contract platform Upwork based its entire business on the premise that human knowledge work is abundant. It just cut a quarter of its own staff. Upwork CEO Hayden Brown announced on May 7 [https://officechai.com/ai/upwork-lays-off-25-of-its-workforce-says-ai-will-lead-to-smaller-teams/] that the company would reduce its workforce by approximately 25%. Her memo, published on Upwork’s website, stated: “Two pizza teams are dead. AI means smaller, differently resourced teams in product and engineering can make a bigger impact than ever.” BUY NOW! [https://wimdodson.gumroad.com/l/gods_in_the_machine?_gl=1*19da5a0*_ga*MTEwMjE2MDkwMy4xNzc2OTY4MDQy*_ga_6LJN6D94N6*czE3NzY5NjgwNDEkbzEkZzEkdDE3NzY5NjgxNzIkajU5JGwwJGgw] Get the NEW Book that exposes the Narratives Tech uses to build its AI Empire. $4.95 flat fee for Kindle, Nook, Tablets, and Mobile. No subscription required.3.5-hr reading time. The irony in the announcement is that Upwork exists to connect businesses with independent knowledge workers: writers, designers, developers, analysts, and marketers. Those are precisely the categories where AI has displaced freelancers most aggressively. Writing projects on Upwork fell 32% year over year in 2025. [https://www.selfemployed.com/news/ai-freelance-platforms-2026/] The CEO of the platform built on freelance demand is cutting staff because the demand for the work the platform sells has contracted. The displacement has an additional dimension. A customer support specialist or content writer displaced from one platform cannot simply apply for the same role at a competitor. Every competitor is reducing that function simultaneously. https://www.vaasblock.com/news/ai-layoffs-workforce-restructuring-cloudflare-coinbase-2026/Read my substack article “How to Ford ‘Amodei’s Moat:’ A Worker’s Guide to the AI Labor Shift [https://futureforwarded.substack.com/p/how-to-ford-amodeis-moat-a-workers]“ to find out how and why AI is making a career change in the labor marketplace has become more difficult. Nevertheless, the supply of mid-market writing, design, and support work is declining across the entire market, not redistributing to a different platform. [https://www.vaasblock.com/news/ai-layoffs-workforce-restructuring-cloudflare-coinbase-2026/] That is the structural unemployment dimension of 2026 that the aggregate statistics are not capturing. BUY NOW [https://wimdodson.gumroad.com/l/invasion_ai?_gl=1*g1iey2*_ga*OTc1NjU2NTcyLjE3NzQwMzA3NjM.*_ga_6LJN6D94N6*czE3NzQwMzMyMjUkbzIkZzEkdDE3NzQwMzQ2ODgkajYwJGwwJGgw]! Get the book that examines how the AI invasion already happened. You just weren’t invited. $9.95 flat fee for Kindle, Nook, Tablets, and Mobile. No subscription required. 2-hr reading time. The Running Total Just Crossed 134,000 A real-time tracker updated today [https://skillsyncer.com/layoffs-tracker]puts the 2026 tech sector layoff total at 134,603 workers across 212 layoff events since January 1. The pace is faster than the same period in 2025. Companies are simultaneously cutting in content creation, customer support, data entry, and basic coding while expanding in AI safety, machine learning operations, and AI-human collaboration roles. The workers being cut and the workers being hired are different people with different skills in different cities. The tracker number has grown by more than 20,000 since Tuesday. Citigroup Is Executing the Final Phase of Its 20,000-cuts Job Plan Citigroup filed WARN notices in New Jersey this week [https://www.thelayoff.com/citigroup] covering separations scheduled between May 21 and June 14, 2026, as part of an AI automation and restructuring strategy. [https://www.thelayoff.com/citigroup] The filings are part of Citi’s multi-year plan to eliminate 20,000 jobs across its global workforce by the end of this year. CFO Mark Mason has stated that headcount will keep declining as AI tools take hold across middle-office and operational functions. WARN notices are public legal documents. They put job losses on the record in a way that earnings call language does not require. The Citigroup filings this week describe tellers, back-office analysts, compliance staff, and IT support workers whose roles are being phased out as AI monitoring systems and automated processes replace them. These are the banking sector equivalents of the workers the IMF is tracking in its middle-class polarization data. The IPO Motive Behind the Week’s Altman Drama This week began with Sam Altman speaking to a group in Sydney and saying the jobs apocalypse he had warned about had not arrived. That story, covered in Tuesday’s edition, acquired a second dimension on Wednesday. Fortune reported [https://fortune.com/2026/05/26/sam-altman-dario-amodei-walking-back-ai-jobs-apocalypse-prophecies-ipo/] that both Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have publicly reversed their most alarming predictions about AI job losses, with the timing coinciding directly with IPO preparations. OpenAI is targeting a late 2026 public listing at a valuation near $1 trillion. Anthropic is planning a 2026 offering at approximately $380 billion. Amodei previously warned that 50% of white-collar jobs faced elimination within several years. He now frames automation as a productivity multiplier. “If you automate 90% of the job,” he said this month, “then everyone does the 10% of the job.” The 10%, he argues, expands to fill 100% of what people do and multiplies their output tenfold. The argument is coherent as economic theory. It describes a future in which workers remain employed and become more productive. It doesn’t seem, though, that many CEOs are treading the “pro-worker” path of AI use. The Yale Budget Lab Data Altman and Amodei Are Leaning On The aggregate stability data that both CEOs are now citing as evidence their earlier predictions were wrong comes from the Yale Budget Lab’s ongoing labor market tracker. The Yale research [https://mlq.ai/news/altman-and-amodei-walk-back-ai-job-apocalypse-warnings-ahead-of-trillion-dollar-ipos/]finds no significant shifts in occupational mix or unemployment for high-AI-exposure jobs since ChatGPT’s 2022 launch. The AI/Labor Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The same research notes that occupational shifts already visible in 2021 were underway before generative AI tools became widely available. The Yale data measures employed workers in formal occupations. It counts people who are in the system. It does not count the contractors, gig workers, and the freelancers who used to work on Upwork. Further, it does not account for the early-exit buyout takers who have already left formal employment and fall outside the tracking algorithms the aggregate statistics rely on. The stability finding is accurate for the population the Yale Report measures.However, that population is getting smaller. Get full access to The AI/Labor Report at ailabor.substack.com/subscribe [https://ailabor.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Microsoft's AI chief puts an 18-month countdown on your job; AI wins 83% of real professional tasks; Goldman counts 16,000 jobs lost monthly; South Korea plans for job disruptions, D.C. doesn't care.

The Man Who Runs Microsoft’s AI Division Just Put a Countdown on Your Job On Tuesday, Sam Altman spoke to executives in Sydney and said the jobs apocalypse was overblown. On Wednesday, the man who runs Microsoft’s AI division contradicted him directly. Mustafa Suleyman told the Financial Times [https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/microsoft-ai-ceo-prediction-future-154055391.html] that most white-collar professional tasks will be fully automated by AI within 12 to 18 months. He named the roles specifically: lawyers, accountants, project managers, marketing professionals. His exact words were “human-level performance on most, if not all, professional tasks.” Suleyman is the CEO of Microsoft AI, a division of the company that simultaneously offers buyouts to 8,750 employees. He knows what the company’s AI systems currently do. His 12-to-18-month window is the most specific timeline any sitting AI executive has attached publicly to mass white-collar automation. Listen on Apple Podcasts [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ai-labor-report/id1896663061] The contrast with Altman’s Tuesday remarks is direct and consequential. Altman said he was “delighted to be wrong” about the speed of job losses. Suleyman said the timeline for displacement is now measured in months. Both men are building the same technology. They are describing two different futures for the same workforce. Challenger, Gray & Christmas confirmed this week [https://afrotech.com/microsoft-ai-ceo-predicts-ai-replace-white-collar-tasks] that AI was the leading stated reason for corporate job cuts for the second consecutive month. AI-attributed layoffs reached 49,135 in 2026 so far. The firm’s chief revenue officer Andy Challenger put the core mechanism plainly: “Regardless of whether individual jobs are being replaced by AI, the money for those roles is.” What Goldman Sachs Found When It Actually Counted Goldman Sachs Research published an analysis this month [https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/the-jobs-ai-is-likely-to-boost-and-those-it-may-disrupt] reported that roughly 16,000 net jobs per month over the past year. The methodology separates AI substitution (where AI replaces workers entirely) from AI augmentation (where AI assists workers and can increase demand for human labor). Substitution is winning. The net effect raised the U.S. unemployment rate by 0.1 percentage points. Goldman economist Joseph Briggs stated that if AI job losses arrive faster than the bank’s base-case projection [https://ai2.work/blog/goldman-sachs-says-ai-job-losses-could-force-the-fed-to-cut-rates], the labor market deterioration could become severe enough to force the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates.BUY NOW! [https://wimdodson.gumroad.com/l/gods_in_the_machine?_gl=1*19da5a0*_ga*MTEwMjE2MDkwMy4xNzc2OTY4MDQy*_ga_6LJN6D94N6*czE3NzY5NjgwNDEkbzEkZzEkdDE3NzY5NjgxNzIkajU5JGwwJGgw] Get the NEW Book that exposes the Narratives Tech uses to build its AI Empire. $4.95 flat fee for Kindle, Nook, Tablets, and Mobile. No subscription required.3.5-hr reading time. So, in roles where AI assists rather than replaces workers, employment and wages are rising. But the augmentation gains are concentrated in a smaller set of occupations than the substitution losses. The labor market is sorting into winners and losers faster than the aggregate statistics reveal. The Benchmark That Made Suleyman’s Claim Concrete Carnegie Endowment for International Peace cited a new OpenAI economist study [https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2026/04/the-ai-labor-debate-three-views-on-the-future-of-work] this month finding that current AI models outperformed human workers on 83% of 220 high-value professional tasks. The tasks were selected from the 44 occupations responsible for the largest share of U.S. GDP. They averaged seven hours to complete. They were written and graded by professionals with an average of 14 years of industry experience. AI won or tied on 83% of the tasks. The benchmark covers legal analysis, financial modeling, project scoping, and technical writing. It covers the specific job categories Suleyman named. Altman’s claim that the apocalypse is smaller than he feared reflects the aggregate unemployment rate. The OpenAI benchmark reflects what AI systems can do today on the actual tasks those workers perform. BUY NOW [https://wimdodson.gumroad.com/l/invasion_ai?_gl=1*g1iey2*_ga*OTc1NjU2NTcyLjE3NzQwMzA3NjM.*_ga_6LJN6D94N6*czE3NzQwMzMyMjUkbzIkZzEkdDE3NzQwMzQ2ODgkajYwJGwwJGgw]! Get the book that examines how the AI invasion already happened. You just weren’t invited. $9.95 flat fee for Kindle, Nook, Tablets, and Mobile. No subscription required. 2-hr reading time. South Korea Is Building a National Response. California Has a 180-Day Study. A Carnegie Endowment report published this month [https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2026/04/from-labor-scarcity-to-ai-society-governing-productivity-in-east-asia] documents the policy gap between East Asia and the United States. South Korea’s 2026 National AI Action Plan tasks five separate government ministries with building retraining hubs, vocational conversion programs, an AI Employment Service Roadmap, and compensation plans for workers displaced by AI. China’s Ministry of Human Resources announced a forthcoming national document on AI’s labor market impact with programs to stabilize employment. Meanwhile, Japan’s government committed to addressing labor shortages through coordinated AI and robotics deployment. The AI/Labor Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. California’s response, covered in this space on Wednesday, is a 180-day study order. South Korea’s response is a multi-ministry deployment with compensation mechanisms already under design. The two approaches describe governments with fundamentally different assessments of how much time workers have before organizations replacing staff with AI. Oracle’s decision to cut between 20,000 and 30,000 workers globally [https://thenextweb.com/news/oracle-layoffs-march-2026] while posting a 95% jump in net income highlights the international policy gap. Approximately 12,000 of those cuts landed in India, Oracle’s largest offshore engineering hub, where a national AI labor protection framework does not yet exist. Oracle co-CEO Mike Sicilia stated publicly that AI coding tools now enable “smaller engineering teams to deliver more complete solutions more quickly.” Who, then, will be left to maintain, update, and interact with human customers? AI Agents? Get full access to The AI/Labor Report at ailabor.substack.com/subscribe [https://ailabor.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Class of 2026 hits decade-high unemployment; PayPal cuts 4,760 for AI savings; Orgs pay AI layoff survivors more and employs fewer; California takes 180 days to study obvious AI worker disruptions

The Degree That Was Supposed to Protect You For most of the past three decades, the standard advice to American workers was direct: get a college degree, move into knowledge work, and stay ahead of the automation wave. That advice produced a generation of workers who did exactly what they were told. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York now reports [https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market] that the unemployment rate for recent college graduates reached 5.6% in March, one of the highest levels in a decade outside of the pandemic. The national unemployment rate stands at 4.3%. New graduates are now faring worse than the general population, a reversal of a pattern that held for thirty years. The Class of 2026 walked across their stages this month into a market that looks nothing like the one their advisors described when they enrolled four years ago. One Worker Who Lost His Job This Week Andrew Tran is 40 years old. He was a product designer at Meta. He lost his job this week [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ai-layoffs-hiring-entry-level-workers/], part of the 8,000-person cut the company executed after redirecting its labor budget toward AI infrastructure. Tran told CBS News he plans to find work at a company using AI “intentionally,” rather than as a tool for replacing workers. He said corporations “should have an obligation to retrain their workforces instead of throwing them to the curb.” Tran represents the demographic the data has been pointing at all year. He is educated, experienced, and employed in the kind of knowledge-work role that was supposed to be safe. He is also 40, which puts him in the age bracket Anthropic’s own labor market research [https://www.anthropic.com/research/labor-market-impacts] identifies as among the most AI-exposed. The workers the technology hits hardest are more likely to be female, over 40, more educated, and better paid than the workers people assumed would be first in line. Listen on Apple Podcasts [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ai-labor-report/id1896663061] PayPal Plans to Cut One in Five Workers Over the Next Three Years Yahoo Finance [https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/paypal-layoffs-ceo-cuts-20-154944985.html] reported that PayPal plans to cut roughly 4,760 workers over the next two to three years. That’s about 20% of its current staff level. PayPal processes payments for millions of American small businesses and independent contractors. The company’s new leadership frames the reduction as part of an AI-driven simplification of operations. Forrester identified earlier this year as a strategy for wage arbitrage dressed up as efficiency [https://www.forrester.com/report/workforce-ai-displacement-2026/]. That slow-burn layoff pattern is the version of displacement most likely to disappear inside the aggregate statistics. BUY NOW! [https://wimdodson.gumroad.com/l/gods_in_the_machine?_gl=1*19da5a0*_ga*MTEwMjE2MDkwMy4xNzc2OTY4MDQy*_ga_6LJN6D94N6*czE3NzY5NjgwNDEkbzEkZzEkdDE3NzY5NjgxNzIkajU5JGwwJGgw] Get the NEW Book that exposes the Narratives Tech uses to build its AI Empire. $4.95 flat fee for Kindle, Nook, Tablets, and Mobile. No subscription required.3.5-hr reading time. California Just Became the First State to Order a Formal Response to AI Worker Displacement Governor Newsom signed Executive Order N-6-26 on May 21 [https://www.gov.ca.gov/2026/05/21/governor-newsom-signs-first-of-its-kind-executive-order-to-prepare-workers-and-businesses-for-potential-ai-disruption/]. The order directs California state agencies to develop policies, gather data, and identify early warning signs of AI-driven workforce disruption. BUY NOW [https://wimdodson.gumroad.com/l/invasion_ai?_gl=1*g1iey2*_ga*OTc1NjU2NTcyLjE3NzQwMzA3NjM.*_ga_6LJN6D94N6*czE3NzQwMzMyMjUkbzIkZzEkdDE3NzQwMzQ2ODgkajYwJGwwJGgw]! Get the book that examines how the AI invasion already happened. You just weren’t invited. $9.95 flat fee for Kindle, Nook, Tablets, and Mobile. No subscription required. 2-hr reading time. It calls for recommendations within 180 days on updates to California’s WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification) Act. WARN currently requires employers to notify workers of large layoffs 60 days in advance. The order also directs agencies to study severance standards, employment insurance, transition support, and worker ownership models. California Labor Federation’s President Lorena Gonzalez said the order is welcome but added that “it’s not enough to just study the issue, we have to take action now.” California is the state with the most AI companies, the most AI workers, and now the most visible political pressure on an executive who wants to run for president in 2028. AI and worker protections looks to be sizing up (along with data centers) to be a main plank of the Democratic Party in the run up to the 2028 Presidential election. California’s Legislature Passed the No Robo Bosses Act — The Same Bill Newsom Already Vetoed Two days before Newsom signed his executive order, the California Senate passed SB 947, the No Robo Bosses Act, 29-9 [https://sd05.senate.ca.gov/news/ca-senate-approves-no-robo-bosses-act-2026-ensure-human-oversight-ai-workplace]. The bill bars employers from relying solely on AI automated decision systems to fire or discipline workers and requires human oversight in termination decisions. The bill now moves to the state Assembly. Newsom vetoed a nearly identical version of this bill last fall. He cited concerns about overly broad restrictions on employers. The current version was revised to address those objections. The question of whether he signs or vetoes it a second time will determine whether the largest state economy produces any binding protection against automated termination decisions before the EU’s equivalent rules take effect in August. The AI/Labor Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Federal Reserve Data Shows What “Stable” Actually Means Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas research [https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2026/0224] published this year finds that employment in AI-exposed sectors trails the broader economy while wages in those same sectors grow faster than the national average. Since fall 2022, national nominal wages rose 7.5%. Wages in the computer systems design sector rose 16.7% over the same period. So, AI is suppressing the number of workers employed while concentrating wage gains among those who remain. Fewer people share a larger total wage pool. The aggregate wage statistics look healthy. The employment statistics in AI-exposed sectors look different. Federal Reserve Bank of New York economists confirmed in May [https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2026/05/do-job-postings-show-early-labor-market-effects-of-ai/] that the effect is already visible in job posting data. Vacancy patterns between AI-exposed and non-exposed occupations are diverging. The signal appears in hiring before it appears in unemployment data. That means the official unemployment statistics are trailing the actual disruption by an unknown lag. The Same Pattern, 9,000 Miles Away A UPI report published Monday [https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2026/05/25/gig-economy-worker/5161779758231/] warns that approximately 40 million gig economy workers across Southeast Asia face AI-driven automation exposure with no meaningful social safety net in place. A McKinsey survey found two-thirds of major Southeast Asian companies have already fully adopted AI or are actively expanding its use. A speaker at a semiconductor conference in Kuala Lumpur last week said the automation trend “has become irreversible.” The 40 million figure describes workers doing the same kinds of tasks that American contractors, platform workers, and call center employees perform. They exist outside any formal employment relationship. They fall outside displacement tracking systems. They face no WARN Act, no severance study, and no executive order. They’re on their own. Get full access to The AI/Labor Report at ailabor.substack.com/subscribe [https://ailabor.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

OpenAI's founder walks back the job apocalypse; the layoff data disagrees with Altman; 370K cuts projected by year-end; trades hiring hard, four-year degree openings stalling harder

The Man Who Built the Fear of AI Is Now Walking It Back OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said this morning AI boom had produced no “jobs apocalypse.” He was speaking virtually at a Commonwealth Bank of Australia conference in Sydney. He said he had expected more entry-level white-collar jobs to be gone by now. He said his intuitions were “just off.” He said he was “delighted to be wrong.” Altman is the person most responsible for raising the alarm in the first place. His comments land at a specific moment, and that moment matters. On the same day, MIT Technology Review published a piece making a similar argument. Drawing on current Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the piece argues the unemployment rate for AI-exposed occupations is actually lower than for occupations with less AI exposure. Erika McEntarfer, who ran the BLS until the Trump administration fired her after a jobs report it found inconvenient, is quoted saying the evidence suggests AI’s labor market impact is “likely small right now.” She adds that “we have time to plan.” The timing of both statements on the same Tuesday is worth noting. The question worth sitting with is what they leave out. Listen on Apple Podcasts [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ai-labor-report/id1896663061] What the Numbers Actually Show As of May 18, more than 113,000 tech workers had lost jobs across 179 companies, at a pace of 825 layoffs per day since January 1. The companies doing the cutting simultaneously committed roughly $725 billion in capital expenditure this year, a 75% increase over 2025, almost entirely directed at AI data centers and infrastructure. That figure covers Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet alone. TrueUp, which tracks tech sector layoffs, projects the full-year 2026 total could reach 370,000. Challenger, Gray & Christmas reports nearly 50,000 job cuts explicitly linked to AI across all industries in 2026, representing about 17% of the 300,000 total job cuts announced so far this year. These are companies that cited AI as a stated reason for cuts in public documents and press releases. Altman himself acknowledged at the same Sydney conference that some companies are “AI washing,” using AI as a cover story for layoffs that would have happened anyway. That admission cuts both ways. It does suggest AI is blamed for cuts it did not cause. It also suggests companies find the explanation useful enough to use publicly. BUY NOW! [https://wimdodson.gumroad.com/l/gods_in_the_machine?_gl=1*19da5a0*_ga*MTEwMjE2MDkwMy4xNzc2OTY4MDQy*_ga_6LJN6D94N6*czE3NzY5NjgwNDEkbzEkZzEkdDE3NzY5NjgxNzIkajU5JGwwJGgw] Get the NEW Book that exposes the Narratives Tech uses to build its AI Empire. $4.95 flat fee for Kindle, Nook, Tablets, and Mobile. No subscription required.3.5-hr reading time. The aggregate unemployment rate looks stable, as McEntarfer says. But a new CNBC and SurveyMonkey survey finds that 53% of workers and 65% of students believe AI is already taking away entry-level job opportunities. Among tech workers specifically, 37% say AI makes their current job feel less secure. One in ten workers has already switched to a trade job or is actively planning to. An additional 24% of students say they think about making the switch sometimes. The headline numbers and the lived experience are telling different stories. Job postings on Handshake between July 2025 and March 2026 were down 2% compared to the same period the year before and down 12% from pre-pandemic levels. The Class of 2026 is graduating into a market that looks nothing like the one their college counselors described when they enrolled. BUY NOW [https://wimdodson.gumroad.com/l/invasion_ai?_gl=1*g1iey2*_ga*OTc1NjU2NTcyLjE3NzQwMzA3NjM.*_ga_6LJN6D94N6*czE3NzQwMzMyMjUkbzIkZzEkdDE3NzQwMzQ2ODgkajYwJGwwJGgw]! Get the book that examines how the AI invasion already happened. You just weren’t invited. $9.95 flat fee for Kindle, Nook, Tablets, and Mobile. No subscription required. 2-hr reading time. The Labor Market Is Reorganizing Around Physical Presence A Randstad analysis of 50 million job postings finds that demand for robotic technicians grew 107% between 2022 and 2026. HVAC engineering vacancies grew 67%. Industrial automation technician openings grew 51%. These roles require physical presence. AI cannot perform them remotely. The reorganization follows a clear logic. AI absorbs the codifiable, desk-based tasks. It drives demand for the physical infrastructure that runs it. Workers whose skills keep them behind a screen face a suppressed hiring market. Workers whose skills put them in a building, a trench, or a data center floor face genuine labor shortages. The AI/Labor Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. A case in point: AT&T plans to invest $38 billion over the next five years hiring and training blue-collar workers, mostly skilled fiber-network technicians, and its CEO says the company cannot find enough of them. Ford and Nvidia are making similar statements. Altman is correct that the aggregate statistics look stable. That observation describes the average. The average is covering two very different labor markets moving in opposite directions at the same time. Get full access to The AI/Labor Report at ailabor.substack.com/subscribe [https://ailabor.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Standard Charter CEO creates international incident with "lower-value human capital" quip, then explains he was right; 99% of CEOs expect layoffs; MIT says AI completes most text-based tasks by 2029

A Bank CEO Called His Employees “Lower-Value Human Capital.” Then He Apologized. Then He Explained That He Was Right. On Tuesday, May 19, Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters stood before investors at a briefing in Hong Kong and described his bank’s plan to cut nearly 8,000 jobs by 2030. The framing he chose was precise. Winters said [https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/2026/05/22/stanchart-ceo-apologizes-for-lower-value-human-comments/90216291007/] the cuts were not cost-cutting but rather “replacing in some cases lower-value human capital with the financial capital and the investment capital we’re putting in.” The reaction was immediate. Former Singapore President Halimah Yacob condemned the terminology publicly on Facebook, [https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/standard-chartered-ceo-apologizes-for-lower-value-human-comments-126052200844_1.html]calling it disturbing to describe workers in such clinical terms. Criticism spread across social media and through Standard Chartered’s key operating hubs in Singapore, Hong Kong, and India, where senior management and staff responded with visible anger. Asian regulators held discussions with the bank following the remarks. Winters sent a memo to staff on Wednesday saying the reporting was taken out of context and that affected workers would receive good advance notice. On Friday morning, Winters posted a fresh LinkedIn message doubling down on the substance of his remarks. Hours later he posted again, this time with an apology. “My choice of words has caused upset to some colleagues. For that I am sorry,” [https://www.thenationalnews.com/future/technology/2026/05/22/bill-winters-apology-standard-chartered-ai/] he wrote. He added that the bank would “continue to speak honestly about the impact of technological change.” Three days. One statement. Two reversals. The substance did not change between Tuesday and Friday. The framing did. Winters had said plainly what most corporate communications carefully avoid saying, that workers in certain roles are interchangeable inputs measured by the value they generate, and that AI inputs cost less. The backlash confirmed that workers understood exactly what he meant. HSBC Delivered the Same Message in Softer Language The day Winters sent his reassurance memo, HSBC CEO Georges Elhedery delivered his own communication to the bank’s 211,000 employees. The message was structurally identical to Winters’ but arrived in warmer packaging. Elhedery urged staff [https://allwork.space/2026/05/hsbc-tells-workers-not-to-fight-ai-while-admitting-its-destroying-banking-jobs/]to make sure they were not fighting the change, not disenfranchised, and not anxious or resisting. [https://allwork.space/2026/05/hsbc-tells-workers-not-to-fight-ai-while-admitting-its-destroying-banking-jobs/] He said AI could make them “more productive versions of themselves.” He also said, plainly, that generative AI will destroy certain jobs while creating new ones. HSBC is reviewing plans [https://www.aol.com/articles/dont-fight-ai-hsbc-ceo-104455000.html]to cut approximately 20,000 roles over the next three to five years, representing roughly 10 percent of its global workforce. The cuts target middle and back-office functions. The bank has appointed a Chief AI Officer and is using AI to reduce client onboarding time by 50 percent. Morgan Stanley analysts confirmed in the same week [https://www.resultsense.com/news/2026-05-21-hsbc-ceo-dont-fight-ai-bank-job-cuts/]that banking, technology, and professional services firms shed one in 20 staff in the past year as a direct result of AI adoption, with offshore workers and entry-level employees absorbing the largest share of those losses. The two largest London-listed Asia-focused banks made essentially the same announcement within 24 hours. Standard Chartered named the number and used the language that caused a diplomatic incident. HSBC named the number and chose its words more carefully. The outcome for the workers affected is the same. 99 Percent of CEOs Expect AI-Driven Layoffs Within Two Years The Standard Chartered and HSBC announcements did not arrive in isolation. Mercer’s Global Talent Trends 2026 report [https://www.mercer.com/about/newsroom/mercer-s-global-talent-trends-2026-report/], drawing on surveys of nearly 12,000 executives, HR leaders, investors, and employees across 16 countries, found that 99 percent of CEOs expect corporate AI initiatives to lead to layoffs in the short term. Only 32 percent said they believed the workforce could optimally combine both human and machine capabilities. The worker side of the same survey is equally direct. Only 44 percent of employees reported thriving at work in 2026 [https://gizmodo.com/99-of-ceos-expect-ai-driven-layoffs-in-the-next-two-years-2000762994], down from 66 percent in 2024 and lower than during the COVID pandemic. Employee concern about job loss due to AI has risen from 28 percent in 2024 to 40 percent in 2026. A workforce operating at those anxiety levels cannot deliver the productivity gains executives are promising investors. That contradiction sits at the center of every AI transformation plan currently in motion. AI Is Now the Leading Stated Reason for U.S. Layoffs In April, AI led all stated reasons for U.S. job cuts [https://www.challengergray.com/blog/challenger-report-april-job-cuts-rise-38-from-march-ytd-cuts-down-50/]for the second consecutive month, with 21,490 announced layoffs attributed directly to AI. That represented 26 percent of all April cuts. AI has been cited for 49,135 job cut announcements so far in 2026, accounting for roughly 16 percent of all job cut plans year to date, per Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The Challenger data carries a specific limitation worth naming. It counts only layoffs in which companies voluntarily cite AI as the reason. It does not count roles eliminated through hiring freezes, contractor non-renewals, or restructurings where AI is the mechanism but not the stated cause. The actual displacement figure is larger than the Challenger number reflects. Researchers Are Now Naming the Anxiety Workers Feel Mercer’s research found that 62 percent of employees [https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/20/ai-impacting-labor-market-like-a-tsunami-as-layoff-fears-mount.html] believe leaders underestimate AI’s emotional and psychological impact on workers. Only 19 percent of HR leaders consider those impacts as part of their digital implementation strategy. Researchers are now proposing a clinical term for the condition: AI Replacement Dysfunction, or AIRD, describing the specific anxiety pattern produced by working in a role you believe will be automated before you can leave it voluntarily. The Standard Chartered episode illustrates why that anxiety is grounded. A King’s College London study [https://www.resultsense.com/news/2026-05-21-hsbc-ceo-dont-fight-ai-bank-job-cuts/] released the same week found six in 10 Britons believe AI will eliminate more jobs than it creates, and one in five expect civil unrest as a result. Workers are not misreading the situation. They are reading the investor briefings. The AI/Labor Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. MIT Researchers: AI Will Complete 80-95 Percent of Text-Based Work Tasks by 2029 MIT FutureTech researchers [https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01363] evaluated AI capabilities across more than 3,000 work tasks drawn from the U.S. Department of Labor’s O*NET database, drawing on more than 17,000 evaluations by actual workers in those roles. They found AI models successfully completing tasks that take humans three to four hours at a 50 percent success rate in mid-2024, rising to 65 percent by late 2025. If current capability growth continues, AI will complete most text-related tasks at an 80 to 95 percent success rate by 2029. That timeline covers the remaining working years of most people currently employed in the occupations Standard Chartered, HSBC, and the consulting firms discussed this week are actively reducing. The MIT assessment is not a prediction about a distant future. For the workers in those roles, 2029 is three performance review cycles away. Get full access to The AI/Labor Report at ailabor.substack.com/subscribe [https://ailabor.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]