Worker Voices: Technology and the Future for Workers

A 2019 report from New America’s Better Life Lab, Worker Voices: Technology and the Future of Workers, draws on interviews with workers across the US experiencing technological change. The report notes that media coverage and popular conceptions around automation tend to center manufacturing and blue-collar jobs while overlooking the experiences of people working in retail, fast food, and administrative jobs, where technological change will disproportionately impact women, primarily Black and Latinx workers. In particular, the authors find that adoption of new workplace technologies can “exacerbate financial insecurity when jobs change, wages or hours are suppressed, or when workers are displaced altogether.”