Giving Compass' Take:

• The most vulnerable of low-wage workers will most likely be overlooked in the policymaking process when deciding what the future of work will look like in terms of AI and automation impact.

• The Metropolitan policy program suggests that workforce policy should be influenced by human-centered design research that interviews workers and takes guidance from lived experience.  This is one way to center workers' voices in the debate about the future of work.

• Learn more about the future worker and the renewal of America's workforce. 

There is a heated debate going on in America right now about what the future of work will look like. Thousands of news stories have covered the potential impacts experts believe artificial intelligence, automation, and robots may have on jobs.

As a new David M. Rubenstein Fellow at Brookings, my scholarship with the Metropolitan Policy Program seeks to turn the future-of-work paradigm on its head. At the center of my research are the workers who are too often overlooked—including women, Black, Latino or Hispanic, and low-wage workers—and brings their voices and perspectives into policy discussions they are often excluded from.

This blind spot that exists toward these vulnerable workers reflects in part the long-run erosion of worker power and the precipitous decline in the reach of unions, rising inequality, the fissuring of the workplace, and the impact of globalization and technology on the “hollowing out” of the job market. Many workers who hold jobs most susceptible to automation—such as food service, retail, and office support workers—lack union membership and a clear representative to speak on their behalf.

Moreover, the public narrative around the future of work is limited by a constricted mental model of who the worker even is. The lion’s share of media coverage focuses on a narrow demographic of white men in blue-collar manufacturing and transportation jobs. Yet this popular conception is at odds with data that shows “the vulnerable are the most vulnerable,” as my colleague Mark Muro points out. Low-wage workers, already struggling with economic precarity, face a disproportionate risk of displacement, as do Black and Latino or Hispanic workers. Women are rarely considered, despite their overrepresentation in many automation-affected occupations.

Read the full article about why the future of work needs to include workers' voices by Molly Kinder at Brookings.