On May 1, much of the world celebrates International Workers' Day, honoring workers' rights and the history of the labor movement. In the United States, however, this public holiday has traditionally been stifled, reflecting the nation's ambivalence toward international labor solidarity and workers' rights.
The US and Canada instead celebrate their own Labour Day in September. Yet the origins of May Day lie in the US itself: on May 1, 1886, mass strikes for an eight-hour workday were met with deadly police repression.
Today, workers' rights face a new threat: artificial intelligence (AI), which jeopardizes the very right to work. In January, Amazon laid off 16,000 employees, the latest round of AI-driven cuts. In October 2025, The New York Times reported the company planned “to replace more than half a million jobs with robots.”
The US leads the world in AI development, a natural fit for a country with a deep commitment to hardline capitalism and the notion that workers should perform like machines. Replacing them with machines entirely seems the logical next step.
A recent trip to San Francisco, the global AI hub, revealed a dystopian landscape of ubiquitous billboards pushing AI. One local campaign by Artisan featured slogans like “Stop Hiring Humans” and “The Era of AI Employees Is Here.” CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack defended the campaign as “provocative,” claiming it aims to replace work people don't want to do.
However, as author Liza Featherstone noted, “The billionaire class seeks a world without workers, or at least one in which workers feel as extraneous and precarious as possible. They love AI because they don’t want to deal with human workers’ demands to be treated as … humans!” Fear in the workplace will only intensify as AI “employees” that don't care about rights take over jobs.
AI's problems, according to a 2026 overview, include “tendency to generate false information, perpetuate biases, and cause substantial environmental and data security risks.” Yet corporations continue to invest heavily: Google, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft spent $130.65 billion on AI data centers in Q1 2026 alone.
US President Donald Trump allegedly supports AI, with his administration claiming commitment to “winning the AI race.” But there is little room for human flourishing in a post-human world. On this May Day, as on every other, there should be no room for AI.
Source: www.aljazeera.com