Reclaiming Worker Power in the Age of AI

The useful part

Activate your online access October 2, 2026 Reclaiming Worker Power in the Age of AI When every price and wage is personalized, organizing gets harder. Sam Levine Share Copy Link Facebook X (Twitter) Bluesky Pocket Email A delivery worker carries a DoorDash bag in New York City, on Tuesday, May 6, 2025. (Yuki Iwamura / Bloomberg via Getty Images) This year, I broke the Yom Kippur fast the way generations of New Yorkers have—with bagels, lox, and—after checking my receipt—some thoughts about the price of food in this city.

How it works

• Perhaps it can estimate how urgently she needs to place an order—say, before the Sabbath.
• How do you organize your neighbors against a price hike when you can't tell whether they received one?
• Today, companies have increasingly sophisticated tools to exercise economic power person by person—consumer by consumer, worker by worker.
• Our job at the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP) is to ask how it affects the people who have to live with it.
• That is the work we have been leading since day one of the Mamdani administration—and, as I will outline here, the work we intend to keep doing in the months and years ahead.

What to take from it

High prices at the Jewish dinner table are nothing new, and perhaps I should have looked to our forebears for some inspiration. A small group of powerful meatpacking companies— the beef trust —had come to dominate the market. For the Jewish immigrant families packed into the neighborhood's tenements, that wasn't just sticker shock.

Example or evidence

• Companies, largely unchecked by government, have spent years building the machinery for this: collecting data, tracking behavior, and testing our responses.
• If AI gives corporations powerful new ways to divide us, we need to build new ways—and strengthen some very old ones—to act together.
• Two women, Fanny Levy and Sarah Edelson, organized their neighbors along Monroe Street door to door.
• They took their campaigns into synagogues, climbing onto bimahs during Shabbat services and calling on their communities to join the boycott.

Details worth keeping

Here's how we're fighting back in New York City. The protest grew to involve some 20,000 New Yorkers. The women had no control over the meatpacking industry.

Related coverage

• Theguardian: Workers should start with a moratorium against building until our livelihoods and communities are protected For the surging number of Americans who now live alongside constantly humming computer-filled...
• Theguardian: The industry is engaged in a perverse quest to replace humans.
• Theguardian: It's becoming obvious to many Americans that corporations have been raking it in while workers take it on the chin Last week, the unlikely duo of Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon spoke before a Washington...
• Thenation: Chris Lehmann And with the Trump administration encouraging unregulated growth in the industry, Democrats need to start acting like it.