There's a question at the heart of the coming automation revolution that too few people in power are willing to answer honestly: Who will own the gains? Will it be the hedge funds, billionaires, and multinational corporations? Or will it be all of us — the people who built this economy and keep it running every day?
Senator Bernie Sanders is one of the few voices in Washington willing to say it out loud. In a landmark October 2025 Senate HELP Committee report, he warned that AI and automation could eliminate nearly 100 million American jobs within a decade — while billionaires and executives pocket record profits. He called it plainly: "The Big Tech Oligarchs' War Against Workers."
He's right. And the data backs him up. Amazon laid off 27,000 workers since 2022 while making $59.2 billion in profit, telling staff that AI "will reduce our total corporate workforce." Walmart cut 70,000 jobs over five years while increasing revenues by $150 billion. JPMorgan Chase — with $58.5 billion in profit — told investors its operations headcount would fall 10% as AI drives productivity above 40%. In each case, CEOs made between $24 million and $37 million in the same year their workers were shown the door.
This isn't new. Since 1973, productivity has risen 150% and corporate profits more than 370% — while real wages for the average American worker have actually fallen by nearly $30 a week. In total, a RAND Corporation study found that $79 trillion has been redistributed from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1% since 1975 — roughly $3.9 trillion every single year, enough to give every worker a raise of $32,000 a year. That's not trickle-down economics. That's a half-century heist.
Now big tech is is positioned to squeeze us even more. If we don't intervene, the benefits of automation and AI will be hoarded at the top, just like the benefits of globalization and deregulation were.
That's why we need to fight for a Workers' Bill of Rights in the Age of Automation — and we need to fight for it now. Here's what it should guarantee:
1. A 32-Hour Workweek with No Loss in Pay
Automation should mean working less for the same or better pay, not working harder for less. Technology should liberate human beings, not grind us down further.
This isn't radical fantasy — it's already happening. Iceland conducted the world's largest trial of a shorter workweek from 2015–2019, involving 2,500 workers — over 1% of the country's working population. The results? Productivity remained the same or improved, while worker wellbeing and work-life balance dramatically increased.
Belgium recently gave workers the right to request a 4-day workweek. Spain is piloting a national 4-day week program. Companies from Microsoft Japan to Perpetual Guardian in New Zealand have proven this works in practice.
Senator Sanders has introduced the Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act, which would reduce the standard workweek from 40 to 32 hours over four years, require overtime pay at time-and-a-half for workdays over 8 hours, and protect workers' pay throughout. American workers are now over 400% more productive than they were when the 40-hour workweek was codified in 1940 — and the gains of that productivity have not gone to them. It's time to change that.
But shorter hours are only the beginning. The deeper question is who owns the machine — and who decides what it does.
2. Democratic Ownership of the Economy
Reducing hours matters. But the root problem is structural: in our current economy, the gains of automation flow to whoever owns the capital. That's true whether a workplace automates heavily or barely at all. The solution isn't just to work less — it's to ensure that workers share in what their labor produces, no matter what form that labor takes.
Large corporations should be required to distribute at least 20% of their stock to workers, allowing workers to directly benefit from the economic gains of AI and automation. Workers must also be allowed to directly elect at least 45% of corporate board members — ensuring no major decisions about automation, layoffs, or restructuring happen without the people most affected by them. And stock buybacks must be banned. They provide no benefit to the productive economy — their only purpose is to enrich wealthy shareholders and executives. They were illegal before 1982 and should be illegal again.
But corporate reform alone isn't enough. We need to build a parallel economy where workers aren't just employees — they're owners. The cooperative model already proves this works at scale. Spain's Mondragon Corporation employs over 80,000 worker-owners across manufacturing, finance, retail, and education — one of the most resilient business networks in Europe. In the United States, roughly 6,500 ESOP companies cover over 14 million workers, and research consistently shows that employee-owned firms outperform conventional competitors on productivity, pay, and job stability. Worker-owned firms are also significantly less likely to lay off workers during downturns — because the people making that decision are the same people who would lose their jobs.
This is also the answer to the automation divide between large corporations and small businesses. A small bakery or local hardware store may never deploy robotics. But its workers still deserve a share of what the business produces. Sanders' proposed U.S. Employee Ownership Bank — providing over $10 billion in low-cost loans and financial assistance to workers who want to purchase their businesses through ESOPs or worker cooperatives — is precisely the mechanism that makes this possible at every scale, not just at Amazon and JPMorgan. The goal is an economy where ownership is broadly distributed: not just a handful of shareholders capturing the gains while everyone else absorbs the risk.
And here's the deeper truth: in workplaces where workers hold real power, they tend to make different choices than executives do. They invest in training rather than layoffs. They share productivity gains as time off rather than executive bonuses. The fight for shorter workweeks and the fight for worker ownership are ultimately the same fight — for a world where the people who do the work get to decide what it's worth.
3. Universal Basic Income and Universal Basic Services
A dignified life must not depend on whether a corporate algorithm still deems you "economically useful." As automation eliminates jobs faster than the market can replace them, we need a floor nobody can fall through — and essential services guaranteed as rights, not privileges: healthcare, education, housing, and public transit.
Universal Basic Services are already proven worldwide. The UK's NHS has provided universal healthcare since 1948. Finland ended homelessness by treating housing as a right, not a commodity — their Housing First program achieved a 90% success rate. Germany offers tuition-free university education to all citizens and international students. These aren't utopian dreams; they're working policies in functioning economies.
The urgency is real. Sanders' report documents that over the past 25 years, the cost of healthcare, rent, childcare, and college education grew faster than baseline inflation by 41%, 55%, 69%, and 115%, respectively. Automation will accelerate this crisis — as fewer workers earn stable wages, more families will be priced out of the basics entirely unless we guarantee them as rights.
Universal Basic Income addresses the cash side of that floor. Alaska has distributed an annual dividend from oil revenues to every resident since 1982 — proof that universal payments don't destroy the work ethic, they supplement it. Stockton, California's guaranteed income pilot reduced full-time unemployment among recipients by 28% while improving mental health and financial stability. Pilot programs in Kenya, Finland, and dozens of other places tell the same story: direct cash payments reduce poverty, improve health outcomes, and give people the breathing room to invest in themselves and their communities.
UBI and Universal Basic Services are not the same policy, but they work together. Services guarantee that the basics are never commodified or out of reach. Income guarantees that people retain autonomy and dignity even when the labor market fails them. Together, they form the foundation a free society requires.
4. AI as Public Infrastructure
The principle is simple: if a technology is built on the commons, its benefits should return to the commons.
AI was built on the commons — on public research, public data, and publicly funded infrastructure. The foundational research behind modern AI came from publicly funded universities and labs. The internet it runs on was built with public money. The data that trained it came from all of us — our writing, our images, our knowledge, accumulated over generations. AI did not emerge from a vacuum of private genius. Companies that profit from it owe a debt to the public: in open access, in open-source releases, and in financial contribution to the public AI infrastructure that benefits everyone.
That means AI should be treated like libraries, roads, and the electrical grid — essential infrastructure that belongs to everyone, not a private revenue stream for a handful of corporations. This means massive public investment in open-source AI development, with the resulting tools freely available to any worker, small business, or community. It means community tech centers where anyone can learn and use these tools regardless of income. It means a publicly funded AI system — built the way we built public universities, public libraries, and the internet itself — that runs alongside private options and ensures that no one is locked out of the most consequential technology of our era.
The precedents are unambiguous. The internet began as ARPANET — a U.S. Defense Department project funded by ARPA in the late 1960s — and became the foundation of the entire digital economy. GPS was developed by the U.S. military and made freely available, spawning industries worth hundreds of billions. The Human Genome Project was a $2.7 billion publicly funded initiative — backed by the NIH, the Department of Energy, and international governments — made open-source, and accelerated medical breakthroughs for the entire world. In each case, public investment created the foundation — and then private actors enclosed it for profit. With AI, we are at that same inflection point. We can choose differently this time.
This also closes the automation gap between large corporations and small businesses. A local manufacturer, community clinic, or worker cooperative shouldn't have to choose between being left behind technologically or being absorbed by a tech giant. Public AI infrastructure gives them a third option — and it gives all of us a baseline of capability that no company can take away by changing its pricing model.
5. AI Companies Owe a Public Debt
The principle established in demand #4 has a direct corollary: companies that built private empires on public foundations owe something back. This is not a radical claim — it is the same logic that governs patents, broadcast spectrum, and public utility regulation. You get to profit from what the public built. In return, you owe something back.
In practice, that means three things:
Open-source older models. AI companies should be required to release older versions of their models into the public domain on a rolling basis — two to three years after a newer generation supersedes them. The revenue loss to companies is minimal; the gain to the public is enormous. This is exactly how patent law already works: a temporary monopoly, then public domain. Meta voluntarily open-sourced its Llama models and the result was an explosion of publicly accessible tools built on top of them — demonstrating that open models accelerate innovation rather than undermining it. What one company did voluntarily should become the legal baseline for all of them.
Universal service obligations. Any AI system that has become effectively necessary for full participation in modern economic and civic life must provide meaningful baseline access at no cost — with the definition of "meaningful" set by a public regulatory body, not the company itself. This is not new. Telephone companies have operated under universal service obligations for decades. Broadband providers have fought the same mandate and lost. The principle is established: when a technology becomes infrastructure, access becomes a right.
An AI Commons Fund. Companies profiting from AI built on public data and public research should contribute a percentage of revenue to a publicly administered fund — directed toward the public AI infrastructure in demand #4, worker retraining, and the broader guarantees in this bill.
This is not a penalty for innovation. It is the price of admission for building a private empire on public land.
6. Worker Voice in Technology Adoption
No company should be allowed to automate away jobs without negotiation and meaningful consent from the workers affected. Not as a courtesy — as a legal requirement.
German labor law has established this principle through co-determination (Mitbestimmung) for decades: in companies with more than 2,000 employees, worker representatives must make up half of the supervisory board. The results speak for themselves — Germany maintains one of the strongest manufacturing sectors in the world precisely because automation decisions are made with workers at the table, not over their heads. Rather than wholesale replacement, German companies more often use automation to augment human work — because the people who would be displaced have a say in how it's deployed. Sweden's union laws similarly require companies to negotiate with workers before implementing major operational changes.
These aren't fringe experiments from radical economies. These are mainstream policies from two of the most competitive industrial nations on earth.
In the U.S. context, this means federal legislation requiring:
- Mandatory technology impact assessments before large-scale automation deployments
- Worker consent or negotiated transition agreements before job-displacing automation is implemented
- Transition funds — paid for by the companies doing the automating — for retraining, severance, and community support
- Union rights strengthened to give workers real leverage in these negotiations, not just a seat at the table they can be ignored from
The goal isn't to stop automation — it's to ensure that when it happens, it happens on terms workers helped negotiate, not terms handed down from a boardroom.
7. Full Employment Guarantee
If the private sector can't provide enough jobs because technology has made human labor "obsolete," the public sector must step in — with dignified, meaningful work focused on what the market chronically underfunds: rebuilding communities, restoring ecosystems, and caring for people.
The U.S. has already proven this works. The Works Progress Administration employed 8.5 million people at its peak, building 650,000 miles of roads, 125,000 public buildings, and 75,000 bridges — infrastructure we still use today — while simultaneously funding artists, writers, and musicians whose work became part of the American cultural fabric. It didn't just put people to work. It built something.
More recently, India's MGNREGA program has guaranteed 100 days of paid employment per year to rural households since 2005, lifting millions out of poverty while building roads, water systems, and community infrastructure. Argentina's Plan Jefes y Jefas provided job guarantees during their economic crisis and demonstrably reduced both poverty and unemployment. The policy works across very different economic contexts.
A federal job guarantee today could focus on the work that most desperately needs doing — work the market ignores because it isn't profitable enough, not because it isn't necessary:
- Ecological restoration and climate adaptation
- Community care work (childcare, eldercare, mental health support)
- Arts, culture, and public education
- Infrastructure repair and renewable energy installation
- Local food systems and regenerative agriculture
These are not consolation prizes for workers displaced by automation. They are essential contributions to a functioning society — work that enriches communities rather than shareholders, and that no algorithm is coming to replace.
Here's the deeper truth:
Automation could be humanity's ticket to freedom. Less drudgery. More creativity, more time for family, art, nature, civic life. A civilization where nobody is forced to work soul-crushing jobs just to survive.
But only if we fight for it. Only if we refuse to accept an economy where the spoils of technological advancement are privatized while the costs are socialized onto the rest of us.
As Sanders put it: "Working people built this country. They deserve to benefit from new technology, not be thrown out on the street while billionaires get even richer."
Technology is not destiny.
Policy is not physics.
The future is still ours to write — if we organize, if we demand better, if we remind those in power that without our labor, nothing moves, nothing runs, nothing is built.
But writing the future requires more than inspiration — it requires a program.
Saying no to mass layoffs matters. Demanding a moratorium on new data centers — which are already consuming 2% of U.S. electricity and growing — is an important part of our agenda. Opposition has its place.
But as Frederick Douglass put it: power concedes nothing without a demand. Resistance alone is not a program. We need the "yes" as much as the "no." And our "yes" is concrete: shorter workweeks, worker ownership, public AI infrastructure, guaranteed income, guaranteed jobs, and universal basic services that treat human dignity as non-negotiable. Not someday. Now.
Part 2: Funding Our Freedom
A UBI, UBS, and Full Employment Guarantee require predictable income streams. How are we going to pay for this bold vision of freedom?
Here are 6 proven, practical funding mechanisms:
1. Wall Street Microtransaction Tax
Impose a 0.01% tax on every stock, bond, and derivatives trade, especially targeting high-frequency trading.
This captures billions (or even trillions) of dollars of financial speculation, which currently generates no real value for society.
It slows down algorithmic trading volatility while funding the social floor everyone needs.
Real-world proof: Sweden had a financial transaction tax in the 1980s. France implemented one in 2012 and currently raises about €1 billion annually. The UK has taxed stock transactions since 1694 — over 300 years — through stamp duty, raising billions yearly without harming their financial sector.
Economists estimate a 0.01% tax in the U.S. could generate $220–$600 billion per decade, depending on trading volumes.
(Bonus: it also weakens the power of finance capital over the real economy.)
2. Progressive Income Tax on High Earners
Instead of complex wealth taxes that face enforcement challenges, we can use proven tax policy:
Progressive income tax rates:
- 70% marginal rate on income over $1 million/year
- 80% on income over $10 million/year
- 90% on income over $50 million/year
This isn't radical — it's historical restoration. The U.S. had a top marginal tax rate of 91% from 1951–1963 under Republican President Eisenhower. During this period, we built the Interstate Highway System, funded the space program, and experienced broad-based prosperity. The rate remained above 70% until 1981.
These high rates don't kill economic growth — they accompanied America's greatest period of middle-class expansion. They fund public investment while preventing the dangerous accumulation of dynastic wealth that corrupts democracy.
Robust corporate taxation:
- Restore the corporate tax rate to 35% (from the current gutted 21%)
- Close tax haven loopholes that allow companies like Apple and Amazon to pay near-zero federal taxes
- Tax corporations based on where they do business, not where they incorporate
- End the preferential treatment of capital gains (where investment income is taxed lower than wages)
Between 1945–1970, U.S. corporate taxes averaged 4–5% of GDP. Today they're barely 1% of GDP despite record corporate profits. Simply returning to historical norms would generate hundreds of billions annually.
Sanders' report also calls for banning stock buybacks — which were illegal before 1982 — as they serve no productive economic purpose and exist only to enrich shareholders at workers' expense.
3. The Robot Tax
Sanders specifically calls for a "robot tax" on large corporations that replace workers with machines, with revenue directed to benefit displaced workers. This article proposes a concrete implementation: the Automation Dividend Trust.
Any company that eliminates more than 10% of its workforce in a single year through automation must contribute to the Trust. The contribution equals:
- 25% of the saved labor costs for 5 years, OR
- Stock equity equivalent to 10% of the automation investment
Unlike trying to track vague "productivity gains," this targets a specific, measurable event: workforce reduction. Companies already track payroll meticulously for tax purposes. When a company fires 1,000 workers and replaces them with software, we know exactly how much they're saving in labor costs.
The formula is simple:
- Previous annual payroll costs for eliminated positions: $50 million
- 25% of that for 5 years: $62.5 million total contribution
The precedent exists: Germany requires companies to negotiate severance packages when eliminating positions. France mandates that companies creating mass layoffs must create a "revitalization plan" and fund retraining. We're simply extending that principle — when you automate away jobs, you contribute to the Trust that supports displaced workers and funds the transition to a post-scarcity economy.
4. Carbon Fee and Dividend System
Charge a carbon fee at the point of fossil fuel extraction (oil wells, coal mines) or importation.
100% of the revenue goes directly back to people as UBI or funds universal services.
This makes polluters pay for climate damages, encourages transition to clean energy, and redistributes the money directly to citizens.
Real-world models: British Columbia, Canada implemented a carbon tax in 2008 and returned the revenue through tax cuts and credits. Switzerland has had a carbon tax since 2008, with two-thirds of revenue redistributed to residents and businesses. Both programs reduced emissions while maintaining economic growth.
The IMF estimates that a global carbon price of $75 per ton could raise revenue equivalent to 2% of global GDP — approximately $2 trillion annually — while driving the emissions reductions necessary to avoid climate catastrophe.
5. End Corporate Welfare and Redirect Subsidies
The U.S. hands $35 billion annually in direct fossil fuel subsidies to Big Oil, Gas, and Coal — on top of $181 billion in total corporate welfare across industries, according to the Cato Institute — a conservative think tank. When externalized pollution costs are included, the IMF estimates U.S. fossil fuel support reaches $760 billion annually.
End these subsidies and redirect the funds toward UBI and UBS. Every dollar currently subsidizing ExxonMobil or Archer Daniels Midland could instead fund healthcare, education, or direct payments to citizens.
The numbers are staggering:
6. Public Ownership and Social Dividends
Establish public ownership stakes in major industries (energy, healthcare, banking, tech platforms) and sectors built with taxpayer money. Citizens collectively own shares of these enterprises, and profits are distributed as dividends to fund UBI + UBS.
Proven models that work:
Norway's Government Pension Fund Global — the "Oil Fund" — is now worth approximately $2 trillion. Norway nationalized oil revenues and invested them for the public good. The fund owns 1.5% of all listed stocks globally and returns billions in dividends annually.
Alaska's Permanent Fund has paid annual dividends to every Alaskan resident since 1982, ranging from $1,000–$2,000 per person — a working model of universal basic income.
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), created in 1933, is a federally owned corporation providing electricity to 10 million people across seven states. It proves public ownership can deliver essential services efficiently while keeping costs lower than private utilities.
We bailed out the banks in 2008 to the tune of $700 billion. Instead of just loans, we should have taken ownership stakes. We funded the research behind pharmaceutical breakthroughs — why do private companies get exclusive patents? We built the internet — why do tech monopolies extract all the value?
When taxpayers take the risk, taxpayers should share the reward.
How We Fund It Isn't The Real Problem
Every single one of these funding mechanisms is proven, practical, and based on real-world examples from functioning economies. We're not asking for untested experiments — we're asking to implement what already works elsewhere.
The money exists. The models exist. The political framework is beginning to take shape — Senator Sanders' October 2025 report gives us a strong base to build from. The only thing missing is the organized power to demand the cure.
Part 3: How We Force This Into Reality
A program without power is a wish list. The question isn't only what we demand — it's how we build the power to make those demands impossible to ignore, even under a Trump administration that has spent its first year attacking federal unions, gutting the NLRB, and handing AI companies everything they ask for.
The good news is that this has been done before — under far more hostile conditions than these. The Nordic welfare states, German co-determination, universal healthcare, public ownership of industry — none of it was given. All of it was taken, through decades of organized class struggle, by workers who refused to accept the terms being offered to them. That history is the blueprint.
The Legal Landscape Is Stacked Against Workers — and Always Has Been
Let's be honest about what workers are up against. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 banned wildcat strikes, solidarity strikes, secondary boycotts, and sympathy actions — the very tools that made the labor movement of the 1930s so powerful. It gave employers the right to hire permanent replacement workers during strikes. It required 60-day notice before any strike action. It fractured labor solidarity by making it illegal to support workers in other industries. As the Center for Economic and Policy Research documents, Taft-Hartley is still screwing workers 78 years later — and the Trump administration has no interest in repealing it.
Then there's the problem inside the house. Too many union leaders have spent decades in labor-management "cooperation" schemes that prioritized institutional survival over worker power. The UAW's RICO corruption scandal and the Teamsters' decades of entrenched leadership are the most visible examples of a broader pattern: unions that exist to manage workers' expectations rather than raise them. That's not a reason to abandon unions. It's a reason to fight for control of them from within.
Rank-and-File Reform Is Already Working
The most important labor victories of the past decade came not from cooperative union bureaucracies but from rank-and-file insurgencies that took control of their own institutions and used them aggressively.
The Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) spent decades organizing within the IBT before finally winning reform leadership in 2021. The new leadership promptly won a historic UPS contract — the largest private-sector collective bargaining agreement in U.S. history — without a strike. In the UAW, members voted two-to-one to reform the union's leadership election rules, directly elected a reform slate in 2023, and then executed a 43-day strike against all three major automakers simultaneously — winning wage increases, cost-of-living protections, and reopening the conversation about a four-day workweek. Rank-and-file democracy produces militant unions; militant unions win.
One warning from history: insurgents who win elections and then dismantle the rank-and-file networks that got them there lose the power they just gained. That is what happened in the United Mine Workers in the 1970s. The rank-and-file organization must outlast the election victory — through durable shop-floor networks, elected steward structures, and contract campaigns that keep members activated between elections.
Taft-Hartley Has Limits
Taft-Hartley severely restricts what unions can do legally. Workers have found ways around it before — and are doing so again.
It cannot stop workers from organizing. In 2025, nearly half a million workers unionized in the United States, with union density rising across federal workers, healthcare, and the South. Starbucks Workers United won 125 union elections in 2025 alone, with an 82% win rate, in one of the most aggressively anti-union corporate environments in the country.
It cannot stop contract campaigns that embed worker protections directly into collective bargaining agreements. The four-day workweek, worker voice over automation, profit-sharing, protection against mass layoffs — none of these require federal legislation if enough unions negotiate them into contracts. That is precisely how Iceland won shorter hours — not through a government mandate, but through a decade of union pressure, pilot programs, and collective bargaining. Iceland's union federation, the BSRB, pushed first in municipal contracts, then expanded outward. By 2022, nearly 90% of the Icelandic workforce had shorter hours or the right to negotiate them, achieved through collective agreements. The government ran the pilots. Sustained 80% union density made the outcomes stick.
And Taft-Hartley cannot ultimately stop workers who decide, in large enough numbers, that the penalties for illegal action are worth paying. The 1937 Flint sit-down strike was illegal. GM capitulated anyway. The 1946 strike wave involved 4.5 million workers defying every legal restriction available to employers. Workers won anyway. The law sets the floor of what workers can be punished for. Solidarity determines the ceiling of what they can win.
The Nordic Lesson: How Workers Won Everything
The Nordic labor movements offer the most instructive model for what organized workers can achieve: near-universal healthcare, free higher education, democratic worker ownership, full employment guarantees, and public control over major industries — built from scratch, over generations, through sustained class struggle.
Starting in the late 19th century, Swedish workers built industry-wide unions that organized entire sectors at once, united under a central federation — the Landsorganisationen (LO), founded in 1898. Union density climbed from near zero in the 1880s to over 85% by the mid-1980s — among the highest in the developed world. The Norwegian and Swedish labor movements spent the 1920s in open class conflict before winning a historic compromise in the mid-1930s — national collective bargaining agreements that became the foundation for social democracy.
The strategy was multi-track and patient. Unions built workplace density first. Then they channeled that density into political power through labor parties. Then they used political power to pass legislation that deepened union density further — creating a self-reinforcing cycle. The Social Democrats held nearly uninterrupted power in Sweden for 44 years, during which time they built universal healthcare, public housing, progressive taxation, full employment policy, and free education — not because capital agreed, but because labor was too powerful and too organized to be refused.
Employers accepted the class compromise in Norway and Sweden only because they viewed it as the tactical option that would best contain a labor movement that was otherwise threatening to take far more. The welfare state was not a gift. It was a negotiated surrender by capital in the face of organized working-class power.
The most radical moment came in the 1970s, when Swedish unions proposed the Meidner Plan — a wage-earners' fund that would have gradually transferred ownership of major corporations to workers by requiring firms to issue voting shares in proportion to profits, with majority representation on fund boards going to union appointees. Capitalists fought it with everything they had and ultimately defeated it by 1991. But the fact that organized labor came within striking distance of democratic worker ownership of the entire Swedish economy is a lesson in what becomes possible when union density reaches 80% and labor controls the government.
That is the target — achievable over a generation through exactly the kind of multi-track, patient, multi-demand organizing this article is calling for.
Fighting for All the Demands, Not Just the Workweek
A shorter workweek is the most immediately winnable demand and the most intuitive rallying point. The full Workers' Bill of Rights — public AI, worker board representation, UBI, public ownership, the Automation Dividend Trust — demands campaigns on multiple fronts simultaneously.
On public AI and open-source technology: The campaign runs through university researchers, open-source developer communities, public library systems, and municipal governments. Cities can fund public AI access centers. Universities can refuse exclusive licensing agreements on publicly funded research. State governments can mandate that any AI tool used in public services be open-source and publicly auditable. Each of these is winnable without federal legislation.
On worker board representation: German co-determination didn't pass because German executives supported it. It passed because a post-war labor movement with 80%+ union density made it a political non-negotiable. In the U.S., the path runs through state-level legislation requiring worker representation on the boards of any company receiving public subsidies, contracts, or bailouts — a condition that applies to an enormous swath of the economy. It also runs through union contract campaigns demanding joint labor-management technology committees with real veto power over automation decisions.
On UBI and public ownership: Ballot initiatives have already passed minimum wage increases and paid sick leave in red states like Missouri, Alaska, and Nebraska. The same direct democracy mechanism is available for state-level dividend funds modeled on Alaska's Permanent Fund, public banking initiatives, and pilot UBI programs. North Dakota has operated a publicly owned state bank since 1919 — a working model any state can replicate to fund worker cooperative transitions and public investment without Wall Street intermediaries.
State pension funds — which collectively manage trillions in retirement savings — can divest from companies engaged in mass automation layoffs and redirect those investments toward worker-owned enterprises. Public procurement contracts can require any company receiving taxpayer dollars to offer profit-sharing, maintain worker representation, or contribute to the Automation Dividend Trust. These are policy levers available to any governor, state treasurer, or city council willing to use them.
Build What Outlasts Elections
The New Deal didn't emerge from FDR's good intentions. It came because the labor organizing of the 1930s had built enough power through strikes and workplace organizing that the political cost of inaction had become higher than the cost of reform. The administration responded to power, not persuasion.
Building that power requires:
- Rank-and-file caucuses in every major union, organized to push leadership toward militancy and hold elected officers accountable
- Worker centers in every major city providing organizing support, legal assistance, and training to non-union workers — especially in tech, logistics, and gig sectors where AI displacement is fastest
- Industry-wide organizing strategies that build union density across entire sectors — the way Nordic unions did — rather than shop by shop, which gives employers the ability to pick off workers one workplace at a time
- Solidarity strike funds that make workers financially capable of sustaining work stoppages long enough to win
- Independent media that frames the automation debate around workers rather than shareholders, builds public understanding of what's at stake, and shifts the political common sense
- Electoral campaigns at every level — city council, state legislature, school board — that run explicitly on this platform and build the pipeline of representatives who will be in office when the federal window opens
- International labor coordination, because the companies automating away jobs are global. The 2025 Black Friday Amazon protests spanned more than 20 countries — and that kind of cross-border solidarity is the only force that matches the scale of transnational capital
Solidarity Forever
The success of the Swedish welfare state — and the Norwegian model, and the Icelandic workweek, and German co-determination — was ultimately a product of what political economist Walter Korpi called "collective power resources": trade unions, mass political parties, and popular movements organized by and for the working class. All of it was built, fought for, and won over generations against employers and governments that considered every single one of these demands dangerous and impossible.
Every right workers have ever won — the weekend, the 8-hour day, the end of child labor, the right to organize — was extracted from hostile employers and hostile governments by organized people who refused to accept the terms being offered to them.
The automation revolution is coming. Whether it happens to us or for us will be decided by what we demand and fight for today — in workplaces, union halls, city councils, ballot initiatives, and beyond.