The Power to Shape What Comes Next: Writing the Future of Work Together

Liba Wenig Rubenstein

Director

Ten years ago, when the Aspen Institute first convened conversations about the future of work, autonomous vehicles were still primarily science fiction, and platform companies were just beginning to reshape how millions of Americans earned their living. Today, generative artificial intelligence has arrived with breathtaking speed, fundamentally altering not just what we expect work to look like, but who has the power to shape it.

I joined the Future of Work Initiative halfway through its curation of, “Back to the Future of Work,”  a remarkable series of reflections from leaders across business, labor, policy, and academia to take stock of the past decade and draw lessons for the next. Taken together, these leaders’ contributions tell a coherent if complex story—not simply of technological progress or disruption, but of power, partnership, and the choices we make (or fail to make) about our collective economic future.

Ultimately, the series suggests that the scope and scale of transformation already wrought and on the close horizon requires a fundamental renegotiation of the terms of work in American society; a new social contract that reflects how people actually work today and will work tomorrow, not outdated models rooted in 19th and 20th century industrial employment. 

Elements of this contract emerged clearly from the series: more democratic governance of workplaces and technological deployment; data rights and dignity; quality standards across all work; protection of human capital and intellectual autonomy; public investment in care infrastructure; benefits that are robust enough to provide real economic security and portable enough to ensure people can pursue the work best suited to them; and accountability for all stakeholders.

However, these elements don’t yet constitute a coherent whole with broad buy-in from diverse stakeholders. Building that consensus—articulating principles that business, labor, policymakers, technologists, and workers themselves can rally around—remains essential work ahead. If we can convene the conversations, support the research, and facilitate the dialogue necessary to demonstrate viable paths forward before political windows close, we have a shot at forging a new compact that, to paraphrase de Tocqueville, can build the habits of liberty necessary to take on the hazards of democracy.

Technology Amplifies the Power Dynamics We Choose

Many factors will drive the future of work, from demographics to climate to political economy and institutional capacity. But technology has always driven inflection points—and flash points—in widespread and fundamental changes to the way we work. Today, of course, the flash point is “generative,” “agentic,” and “general” artificial intelligence. At the heart of our current discourse lies a profound irony: The technology industry has enthusiastically adopted the language of “autonomy” and “agency” to describe AI systems—celebrating machines that can act independently and make decisions with minimal oversight. Yet these are precisely the qualities that too many jobs deny to human workers. The home care worker whose schedule is algorithm-determined has no autonomy. The warehouse employee whose every movement is tracked has no agency. Millions of Americans, as Service Employee International Union President April Verrett describes, “play by rules they never wrote.”

As Michelle Miller, of Harvard’s Center for Labor and a Just Economy, reminds us, anxiety about automation has repeated itself for 500 years, often reflecting the concerns of those creating the narratives more than the realities of working-class life. Meanwhile, President of the National Domestic Workers Alliance Ai-jen Poo describes domestic workers as “ultimate futurists,” revealing how professional and economic precarity, once considered marginal, has become mainstream across sectors—not because of technology, but because of choices about how to structure work.

AI presents an extraordinary opportunity. As Asutosh Padhi of McKinsey emphasizes, when implemented thoughtfully in ways that build social trust and align with core human values, AI has the potential to enhance productivity, supercharge economic growth, and improve work quality. His focus on the need for leaders to reaffirm values as guiding principles when making decisions about technology deployment reminds us that productivity gains mean little if they don’t translate into inclusive economic wealth creation. As Don Howard, President and CEO of The Irvine Foundation, emphasizes in his piece, we cannot build a thriving economy or healthy democracy on a foundation of disempowered, anxious workers. Dignity, purpose, security, and optimism require genuine human agency and respect.

Ultimately, if there is one thread that weaves through every contribution to this series, it is this: the future of work is fundamentally shaped by questions of power and agency, not by technology alone. So, if we want to harness technology to solve problems that people want solved—rather than technology that may render people the problem that needs solving—we need to focus on how power is distributed, exercised, and balanced in the decades ahead.  

Sharing Power is Good for Business

A thriving economy or healthy democracy also depends on business playing an active, constructive role. The good news is that many companies and technology leaders recognize that we’re at an inflection point. But they need resources to help them humanely navigate the tension between rapid technological change and the painstaking work of building social trust—for the benefit of their workers, their communities, and their bottom lines.

Venture capitalist and contributor Roy Bahat, of Bloomberg Beta, chairs our Aspen Business Roundtable on Organized Labor as part of broader efforts to bridge the chasm between business and labor when it comes to AI.  He explains that worker power can be a source of value rather than a constraint—that businesses benefit from employees who feel secure, valued, and empowered. When workers have voice and ownership, they’re more invested in company success, more likely to share knowledge and innovate, and constitute the kind of stable, committed workforce that drives long-term competitive advantage.

This insight must translate into fundamental shifts in business practice. Companies that succeed in the next decade with their culture and license to operate intact will likely be those that afford workers a seat at the decisionmaking table at various levels. Mechanisms of worker empowerment can help surface problems early, co-create solutions, tap into knowledge that often doesn’t make it to the C-suite or the board, and build the trust necessary for navigating rapid technological change. If we can create sustained spaces for forward thinking business leaders and labor innovators to build trust away from public scrutiny, we can develop the proof points that shift entire industries.

Toward a New Social Contract for Work in America

The contributions to this series offer honest assessment of what the future of work field has learned:

Keep an eye on the big picture; particulars can distract. We worried about robots and autonomous vehicles while generative AI developed outside our view. We debated gig platforms and classification while broader precarity spread. The lesson: rather than predicting individual technologies, we need governance structures that ensure workers and small businesses have voice and agency regardless of what transpires. 

Speed merits scrutiny. “Move fast and break things” was once a Silicon Valley mantra envied and emulated by companies across the American economy; now we know that approach serves to externalize the costs for what gets broken. As Elizabeth Wilkins, President and CEO of the Roosevelt Institute, documents, the speed of AI development has resulted in extreme power imbalances. At the same time, skeptics warn that the industry has not yet identified a business case justifying the unprecedented resources that have been rapidly mobilized to build and train AI systems. Ultimately, whether AI succeeds spectacularly or disappoints, structural power for workers—both to shape deployment and weather disruption—could insert some useful friction that would mitigate risk for the whole ecosystem.

We get it right when we focus on fundamentals: recognize that job quality matters more than job quantity; center care work as essential to economic function; build coalitions across labor, technology policy, and civil society; understand that flexibility without security is precarity; remember that workers are also caregivers, creatives, and civic leaders.

Out of these lessons emerge some areas of focus for those who care about a future of work that works for everyone: 

Foster Business-Labor Partnerships Around Shared Interests

When McKinsey’s Padhi emphasizes the need for trust and values alignment, I see opportunities for collaboration. What if the reason 90% of CEOs (according to Padhi) admit in private that they have not fundamentally seen the value creation promised when they chose to make major technology investments is because these technologies were implemented without sufficient collaboration with the workers who would be using them? Looking ahead, it seems clear that AI has the potential to reduce dangerous or tedious tasks, support better decision-making, and create new opportunities. The question is process: are workers co-designing implementation or resisting it out of fear it will replace them?

Business leaders, workers and their representatives must develop joint approaches to technology adoption, implement pilot projects that test worker-centered AI, and share insights about operationalizing worker engagement and input to improve both business outcomes and job quality. Microsoft took leadership on this front when it entered into a neutrality agreement and AI partnership with the AFL-CIO; we need more collaborations like this that marry the core competencies and priorities of business and labor for mutual, long term benefit. If the Future of Work Initiative can continue convening these unlikely partners and amplifying proven models—creating the rare spaces where leaders can develop courage to buck convention—we can shift the paradigm from adversarial labor relations to genuine partnership.

Address Structural Foundations of Job Quality

No amount of participatory AI governance solves the fundamental problem Poo identifies: tens of millions of jobs don’t provide living wages or basic benefits. This requires business model innovation (worker representation on boards, employee ownership, profit-sharing, cooperative structures), public investment (care infrastructure, portable benefits systems), and policy reform (sectoral bargaining, strengthened organizing rights). 

Even with improvements in job quality, most workers will navigate multiple significant transitions in the coming decades. We must build the education and transition infrastructure NYU’s Arun Sundararajan advocates, and the adaptable financial security infrastructure described by Prudential’s Dylan Tyson to support mid-career workers in a comprehensive way. 

SEIU’s Verrett reminds us that technology transformation cannot be divorced from centuries of discrimination, as algorithms encode and amplify existing biases. Any viable path forward must explicitly address how AI governance can reduce rather than perpetuate racial, gender, and geographic inequities—centering voices historically excluded from economic power.

As Lyft CEO David Risher notes, gig work emerged because people wanted “more control over their lives” but found themselves “missing the benefits of traditional work.” The new social contract must resolve this tension: providing security while allowing for the inevitable vagaries and variances of real lives, enabling both worker autonomy and collective power, ensuring both innovation and accountability.

Test and Amplify Governance Mechanisms that Can Endure

Because we cannot predict specifics, we need durable structures for worker participation in decision-making. This includes supporting sectoral bargaining experiments (like California’s AB1340 which extends collective bargaining rights to more than 800,000 rideshare drivers), documenting successful worker representation models (like Pennsylvania’s Generative AI Labor and Management Collaboration Group), and developing transparency frameworks that apply across technologies and industries. 

An AI-driven economy also requires new conceptions of ownership. As the value of human labor shifts, data increasingly represents our collective contribution and value. Mary Gray argues that workers deserve ownership over decisions determining how their productivity data is collected, used, and monetized—including rights to audit AI systems, collectively bargain over algorithmic management, and override automated decisions when human judgment is essential.

Normalizing greater worker participation and control in these ways will require expanded and thoughtful approaches to information sharing and new conceptions of worker education and training. If we can connect researchers documenting these issues with policymakers, business leaders, and worker advocates developing practical frameworks, we can accelerate adoption of more equitable and sustainable forms of shared power, ownership, and decisionmaking. 

Cultivate Leaders to Navigate Known Headwinds with Strategic Realism

When United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther and General Motors CEO “Engine” Charlie Wilson forged the “Treaty of Detroit” in 1950, they set the terms for a broad social contract that governed work in America for the following prosperous decades. We must create the conditions to convene, inspire, and incentivize a new generation of leaders who will be willing and able to step up and forge a new compromise for a new era of work.

Both institutional and cultural obstacles challenge the prospects of progress. While massive resource asymmetries favor large corporations, labor institutions require rebuilding from positions of relative weakness. Political polarization poisons opportunities for policy change, while beyond traditional partisan divides we face deeply embedded resistance to expanded worker power from business and increasingly deep skepticism of AI from workers. And as always the speed of technological change outpaces democratic deliberation.

These are not reasons for pessimism—they’re realities requiring strategic response. We cannot overcome obstacles we refuse to name. Each demands specific approaches, but all require the kind of persistent relationship-building that shifts political will over time. To complement bottom-up efforts that will organize, mobilize, and build new vectors of solidarity among workers, we will need clear-eyed and courageous leaders to question received wisdom and see the value in perhaps unconventional partnership.

The Future We Choose

Harvard’s Miller asks us to move beyond 500 years of merely reacting to technological change and instead assert an agenda driven by working people’s imagination. Wilkins reminds us that windows for structural change don’t stay open forever. And throughout these contributions runs a common thread: the future is not inevitable—it reflects the choices we make.

We have the opportunity to deploy AI in ways that enhance human labor, create shared prosperity, and strengthen democratic participation. The difference lies not in the technology itself, but in who has power to shape its deployment and accountability when that power is misused.

For technology companies and business leaders: the invitation is to be genuine partners in building structures for worker voice. As Bahat and his Roundtable peers demonstrate, companies that proactively engage workers in technology decisions, bring them to the table with representation on corporate boards, and share ownership will likely build better products, more resilient organizations, and help forge the societal trust needed to navigate disruption. The alternative breeds reputational risk, regulation, and escalating conflict. (Hint: Join the Aspen Business Roundtable on Organized Labor.)

For labor organizations and worker advocates: the task is building both the technological expertise and structural power sufficient to the moment while remaining open to partnerships where interests align. Strategic engagement requires neither pure opposition nor accommodation, but informed participation demonstrating what workers bring to the table.

For policymakers: the responsibility is creating frameworks that enable innovation while ensuring it serves broad prosperity. This means stronger organizing rights, transparency requirements, enforcement capacity, and public investment in infrastructure that makes quality work possible.

For philanthropic partners: the opportunity is investing in the infrastructure of trust-building and experimentation that neither government, nor labor, nor business can sustain alone. If we can support the long-term work of convening unlikely allies, documenting emerging models, building capacity for worker participation in technology governance, and cultivating leadership courage necessary for transformative change, we can create the conditions for systemic shifts that outlast any single political moment or economic cycle.

The agenda this series describes is ambitious. It requires political courage, sustained effort, and willingness to challenge existing power arrangements. But the alternative—allowing current trajectories to continue—risks economic precarity, democratic erosion, and social fracture on scales that threaten everyone’s interests. No amount of productivity gains from AI can compensate for an economy where most people feel powerless and left behind.

As SEIU’s Verrett concludes: “The future of work is still being written. Let’s make sure it works for all of us.”

That is the commitment of the Aspen Institute’s Future of Work Initiative, and the work that lies ahead—not as adversaries across unbridgeable divides, but as partners in building an economy where technological progress and human dignity advance together.