To Confront AI Monopolies, We Need Worker Power

A Few Tech CEOs Can’t Decide AI for the Rest of Us

We’ve known for a while that we can’t deploy AI technology successfully and inclusively without workers’ voices. What fewer predicted was just how fast the foundational infrastructure of AI would consolidate into the hands of a few companies like Google, Meta, and OpenAI. Already, this bloc is making unilateral decisions about AI that benefit shareholders and executives at the expense of workers and communities, and that will only accelerate if we stay this course.

In a new piece for the Aspen Institute’s Future of Work Initiative, Roosevelt President and CEO Elizabeth Wilkins explores what it will take to ensure AI actually delivers shared prosperity instead of making the rich richer: building worker power at a scale that can match these technological disruptions.

That requires a twofold solution of corporate regulation and sectoral bargaining. Regulators could mandate worker representation on managerial decision-making boards and require companies to take into account a wider swath of stakeholders. “This would mean tech giants like Google, Meta, and OpenAI would need federal charters requiring them not only to put workers on the board but also to consider worker, community, and societal impacts of AI development—not just shareholder profits,” writes Wilkins.

AI affects entire industries, which means worker power can’t be constrained to specific companies. Sectoral bargaining is one way to consolidate worker knowledge across firms and to ensure all firms are required to play by the same rules and abide by the same standards. “We need to be honest about the enormity of the task of building worker power capable of countering the employer power arranged behind AI deployment,” Wilkins writes. All workers, and tech workers specifically, need to be organized toward this cause.

The political opportunity for this transformative change is on the horizon: Workers are increasingly anxious as disruption accelerates, and the industry itself is nervous about whether its growth is sustainable. “A corporate-captured future is not inevitable,” Wilkins writes. “Our choices—in business, in policy, and in organizing—will shape whether AI becomes a tool for shared prosperity or further concentration of power.”

Read the piece: “Worker Power in the Age of AI Monopolies: Why We Need Structural Solutions Now”

“Risk Aversion” Isn’t the Right Lens to Look at the Racial Wealth Gap

Some studies suggest that risk aversion is a contributing factor to the racial wealth gap—that minority groups make less risky investments, leaving them with less potential for wealth growth. In a new brief, Roosevelt fellow Zawadi Rucks-Ahidiana investigates whether this theory holds, or if differences in risk tolerance levels even exist among racial groups. What she finds is that socioeconomic variables correlate much more strongly with risk aversion than racial variables.

Rucks-Ahidiana compares the relationship between willingness to take on financial risk and three socioeconomic variables—net worth, income, and education level—across white, Black, and Latino Americans. She finds that those with lower wealth, income, and education status will typically be much less risk tolerant than their wealthier or more educated peers, and that this pattern exists across racial groups. “The relationship between socioeconomic status and willingness to take on risk suggests that willingness to take on risky investments is a calculation based on logic, reason, and reality for most Americans,” Rucks-Ahidiana writes.

“Racial differences in socioeconomic position do not need individual interventions to correct ‘poor’ decision-making,” Rucks-Ahidiana writes. “None of these underlying issues are produced by individual behavior or decisions, and so none of them can be addressed with individual-level interventions.”

Read the brief: “What ‘Risk Aversion’ Gets Wrong About the Racial Wealth Gap”

Creating an Economy That Works for Disabled People

The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 ensured significant and meaningful wins on disability rights and economic inclusion, but 35 years later, disabled people still remain twice as likely to live in poverty. On September 17, the Roosevelt Institute and the National Academy of Social Insurance are virtually hosting the first annual Disability Economic Policy Research Symposium to discuss how to break down barriers to economic mobility and full participation in society for millions of people. The symposium will also mark the launch of the Disability Economic Policy Research Consortium, a new initiative Roosevelt is thrilled to co-convene with the Academy.

Roosevelt to Honor Four Freedoms Awardees

On Saturday, the Roosevelt Institute will celebrate the legacy of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt by awarding five individuals and institutions for exemplifying FDR’s four freedoms—freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. This year, we will be honoring Teen Vogue, Dr. Jacqui Lewis, World Central Kitchen, Center for Victims of Torture, and Ford Foundation President Darren Walker. You can watch via Roosevelt’s YouTube livestream on Saturday at 11:00 am ET.

What We’re Talking About

What We’re Reading

• On the “double tax” Black women face: In a new Q&A with Roosevelt’s Noa Rosinplotz, Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman discusses the combined cost of sexism and racism that magnifies economic hardship—and can foretell problems for the entire economy. “The crises that begin with women of color, especially Black women,” she said, “ultimately end up on everybody else’s doorstep.”
  • Opoku-Agyeman also spoke with Marketplace and ABC News, where she discussed how layoffs send ripple effects throughout entire communities.
  • For more from Opoku-Agyeman, check out her new book The Double Tax: How Women of Color Are Overcharged and Underpaid, which comes out Tuesday, September 16. You can preorder a copy and buy virtual or in-person tickets for a conversation between Opoku-Agyeman and Chelsea Clinton on Wednesday, September 17, at the 92nd Street Y.
• On Trump’s version of public ownership: “The United States has entered a new era of state capitalism,” Roosevelt’s Todd N. Tucker writes in The New Republic about Trump’s move to purchase equity in Intel. “The real question is no longer whether the state will act, but whose interests it will serve.”
  • “While some observers may prefer to cast these moves as an idiosyncratic choice by a singularly unpredictable and disruptive president,” Tucker writes, “the reality is that Trump is merely swimming with the prevailing tides of the global economy.”
  • The US can learn from the industrial policy tools other countries are successfully using to shape markets to serve the people. For more, read the Roosevelt report Industrial Policy 2025: Bringing the State Back In (Again).
• On making Medicare less accessible: The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services is launching a pilot program next year that will burden Medicare recipients in six states with prior authorization requirements—an approval process “typically deployed by private health insurers, infuriating doctors and patients,” Roosevelt author-in-residence Miranda Yaver writes for MSNBC.
  • “Applying the tools of managed health care to seniors, who may face cognitive decline and worsened physical health, is a recipe for disaster . . . “ writes Yaver. “In a nation as wealthy as the United States, seniors’ epitaphs should not be at risk of reading, ‘Died of red tape.’”