International Workers' Day on May 1 highlights ongoing struggles for workers' rights, particularly in the context of rising AI technologies. In the US, companies like Amazon are laying off thousands of workers, citing AI as a driving force behind these job cuts.
Key points
International Workers' Day is celebrated on May 1.
The US has a historical resistance to May Day celebrations.
AI is causing significant job losses in the US.
Amazon plans to replace many jobs with robots.
May Day originated from labor movements in the US.
Mentioned in this story
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On May 1, much of the world celebrates International Workers’ Day, or May Day, honouring workers’ rights and the history of the labour movement. A public holiday in many countries, May Day has traditionally been stifled in the United States, a nation that has never been big on either international labour solidarity or workers’ rights.
The US and its tagalong to the north, Canada, instead celebrate their own exclusive Labour Day in September. But the origins of May Day lie in the US itself, where, on the first of May in the year 1886, mass strikes on behalf of an eight-hour workday broke out and were quickly met with deadly police repression.
Nowadays, workers’ rights are under fire from another direction: artificial intelligence (AI), which threatens the very right of workers to, well, work.
In January, Amazon – the second-largest employer in the US after Walmart – moved to lay off 16,000 employees, the latest round of sweeping layoffs on account of AI. In October 2025, The New York Times reported that the company had plans “to replace more than half a million jobs with robots”.
The US presently leads the world in AI development – an unsurprising development given the country’s special relationship with die-hard capitalism and the idea that workers should perform like machines. What more logical next step than to replace them with machines altogether?
I, myself, generally try to avoid the US at all cost, having found it sufficiently creepy and alienating long prior to the AI takeover. On a recent trip to San Francisco, the world’s leading AI and tech hub, I found that the landscape had been rendered ever more dystopian by ubiquitous billboards and other signage pushing AI down everyone’s throats.
I was in town visiting a young Colombian man I had met in the Darien Gap, the deadly migration crossroads of the Americas, as he made his way north in pursuit of the American dream or at least enough money to survive. He was now working construction in the San Francisco Bay Area, which I had figured was at least one profession immune from AI disruption, but the internet informed me that .
Q&A
What is the significance of International Workers' Day?
International Workers' Day, celebrated on May 1, honors workers' rights and the history of the labor movement.
How is AI impacting jobs in the US?
AI is leading to significant layoffs, with companies like Amazon planning to replace many jobs with robots, affecting thousands of workers.
Why does the US celebrate Labour Day in September instead of May Day?
The US celebrates Labour Day in September due to its historical resistance to international labor solidarity and workers' rights, unlike many other countries that observe May Day.
What were the origins of May Day in the US?
May Day originated in the US in 1886, marked by mass strikes advocating for an eight-hour workday, which were met with police repression.
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Driving into the city, it was difficult to spot a billboard promoting anything but AI. One local advertising campaign, courtesy of the San Francisco-based AI agency Artisan, had repeatedly made headlines for its overtly callous nature. The company’s posters offered a range of advice: “Stop Hiring Humans”; “The Era of AI Employees Is Here”; and “Artisans Won’t Complain About Work-Life Balance”.
Artisan CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, 24, has been quoted as defending the campaign as intentionally “provocative” and suggesting that his firm’s aim wasn’t really as inhumane as it seemed: “We’re going after replacing the work that people don’t want to do so they can do the work they actually enjoy.”
But unfortunately for Carmichael-Jack, there is something called reality. And for a whole lot of folks in the real world, a job is often a means to put food on the table and cover the basic necessities of existence – an increasingly formidable undertaking, especially in a country that prefers to fund genocide in Gaza and war on Iran rather than provide affordable housing and healthcare options for its own people.
In other words, it’s unlikely that the average Amazon worker who loses their job to AI is spontaneously going to find themselves doing something they “enjoy” – like, I dunno, being the 24-year-old CEO of an AI agency in California.
As Liza Featherstone, the author of Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Walmart, told me: “The billionaire class seeks a world without workers, or at least one in which workers feel as extraneous and precarious as possible. They love AI because they don’t want to deal with human workers’ demands to be treated as … humans!”
To be sure, precarious employment is an intrinsic component of capitalism, as workers who live in fear of losing their jobs are less likely to speak up for their rights.
Just look at the recent sordid history of corporate union-busting by the likes of Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s, which have relied on patently illegal and underhanded tactics like firing pro-union workers and threatening to withhold health benefits from employees who don’t toe the anti-union line.
And fear in the workplace will no doubt only intensify as “AI employees” that don’t care about rights start snatching up jobs left and right.
In the end, AI is not only the culmination of longstanding corporate efforts to convert the Earth’s inhabitants into digitally addicted automatons. It is also the culmination of a lengthy corporate track record of worker oppression.
Just for the hell of it I googled “problems with AI” to see what the AI Overview response was. According to the answer I got, problems ranged from “immediate technical failures and ethical dilemmas to long-term societal and safety risks”.
As of early 2026, the overview specified, “key issues” included the “tendency to generate false information, perpetuate biases, and cause substantial environmental and data security risks”.
Of course, none of this has stopped the corporate plutocrats from betting on AI. On April 29, The New York Times revealed that, in just the first three months of this year, Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft had “plowed a total of $130.65 billion into capital expenditures, largely spending on data centers that power A.I.”
Meanwhile, certain elite executives have noted that AI currently costs way more than human workers. But never mind such trivialities.
For his part, US President Donald Trump is all about AI, and a March press release from the White House announced that the Trump administration is “committed to winning the AI race to usher in a new era of human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security for the American people”.
But it goes without saying that there is little room for human flourishing in a post-human world. And on this May Day, as on every other day, there should be no room for AI.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
