When Labour Still Has Leverage
Imagine waking up tomorrow to discover that employees of every major corporation in the world had resigned.
Not gone on strike. Not staged a protest outside company headquarters. They had simply resigned. Tens of millions of people deciding, on the same day, that they would no longer participate in a system they believed distributed the rewards of their labour unfairly. They would not be demanding higher wages or better benefits. Their demand would be much simpler: rethink how the profits generated by our collective work are shared.
At first glance, the idea sounds absurd. Organising something on this scale would be practically impossible and would rank among the largest acts of collective coordination in human history. Yet that is one reason why it makes for such an interesting thought experiment. It forces us to ask questions about power, ownership and dependency. Are our current economic arrangements genuinely the fairest ones available, or have they simply become accepted because they have existed for so long?
The immediate consequences would be immense. Stock markets would likely fall sharply. Supply chains would begin to seize up. Supermarkets would struggle to replenish their shelves. Banks, technology companies, pharmaceutical firms, airlines, manufacturers and logistics providers would all confront the same uncomfortable reality. Capital without labour achieves very little. Every company, regardless of how sophisticated its technology becomes, still depends on people deciding to turn up for work.
This is something that often gets overlooked when we discuss capitalism. We spend a great deal of time talking about investment, entrepreneurship and risk, all of which deserve recognition. Starting a company is difficult. Building one into a successful global enterprise is harder still. Founders frequently sacrifice years of income while assuming enormous personal and financial risks. Investors commit capital knowing they may lose everything.
Labour, however, assumes a different kind of risk. Employees may not invest financial capital, but they invest their time, their health, their relationships and often decades of their lives. Most people cannot diversify that investment in the way investors diversify a portfolio. Losing a job is not simply a financial setback. For many people it threatens their mortgage, their family and their future. That is a very different kind of exposure, but exposure nonetheless.
Perhaps that is why debates about profit distribution never really disappear. They are not simply arguments about money. They are arguments about value. How much of a company’s success belongs to the people who conceived it? How much belongs to those who financed it? How much belongs to the people who spend years building, maintaining and improving it? There is no universally accepted answer, which is why the discussion never really goes away.
If millions of people resigned simultaneously, governments would intervene almost immediately. Critical industries would have to be prioritised. Negotiations between governments, employers and worker representatives would begin almost overnight. Politicians who usually champion free markets might suddenly find themselves calling for intervention, while others would argue corporations had finally been forced to confront a problem they had ignored for decades.
Whether any of this would actually produce lasting change is far less obvious. Faced with losing their workforce, many companies might rethink compensation. Employee ownership schemes could become more common. Profit-sharing arrangements might move from being an exception to becoming an expectation. Executive compensation would likely come under renewed scrutiny. Boards might conclude that pay packages hundreds of times greater than those of ordinary employees are becoming increasingly difficult to justify.
It is equally possible that very little would change. Companies could accelerate automation. Governments could weaken labour protections in the name of economic stability. Public sympathy might evaporate once shortages began affecting everyday life. History suggests that people often support protest movements until those protests begin inconveniencing them personally.
There is also a deeper question that rarely receives enough attention. What exactly counts as a fair distribution of profit? Should every employee receive an equal share regardless of responsibility or contribution? Almost nobody argues that they should. Should profits instead reflect individual contribution? That sounds reasonable until someone attempts to measure contribution objectively. Is the engineer who designs a product more valuable than the technician who manufactures it? Is the salesperson who wins the client more valuable than the support representative who keeps that client for years? Modern organisations are so interconnected that separating individual contributions quickly becomes an impossible exercise.
Founders present a similar challenge. Many create businesses from nothing, assuming years of uncertainty before the first employee is ever hired. It seems reasonable that they should benefit disproportionately if the company succeeds. At the same time, companies rarely become global successes because of one person alone. Thousands of employees spend years turning a founder’s vision into an operational reality. Without them, the vision remains exactly that.
The thought experiment also exposes something else. Most people do not actually want corporations to fail. We depend on them. They provide employment, develop medicines, build infrastructure, create technologies, transport goods and produce many of the products we rely upon every day. Even many critics of corporate power benefit enormously from the conveniences those corporations create. The issue is rarely the existence of corporations themselves. It is whether the rewards generated by collective effort reflect that effort in a way people recognise as fair.
Fairness is also deeply subjective. Ask an employee who has spent twenty years helping build a company and they may wonder why a CEO earns hundreds of times more than they do. Ask the founder who mortgaged their house before the company had a single customer and they may wonder why those risks should not be rewarded disproportionately. Neither perspective is obviously irrational, which perhaps explains why arguments over wealth distribution never seem to disappear. The question becomes even more interesting if we assume labour’s leverage may not last forever.
There is, however, another dimension to this discussion that is difficult to ignore. For most of modern history, labour has possessed one form of leverage that capital could never fully replace: people. Companies could relocate factories, outsource work and invest in better machinery, but they still required millions of employees to keep operating. Artificial intelligence may be about to change that equation in ways we have barely begun to appreciate.
How that change unfolds is unlikely to be uniform. A warehouse operative, a software engineer, a lawyer, a nurse and a graphic designer are unlikely to experience AI in the same way or on the same timeline. Some jobs may disappear entirely. Others may become significantly more productive, while many will simply evolve into something different. History suggests that new technologies often create opportunities as well as eliminate them. The concern is not that every employee becomes obsolete, but that the balance of power gradually shifts. If companies can achieve the same output with fewer people, then labour inevitably loses some of the leverage it once possessed.
Over the next decade, AI is likely to eliminate, augment or reshape millions of jobs across almost every industry. Nobody knows the exact scale, the timeline or even which professions will be most affected. Whatever the numbers eventually prove to be, few serious observers now dispute the direction of travel. If that proves to be true, then the bargaining power employees have collectively enjoyed for generations may already be beginning to erode. A coordinated resignation today would likely bring many corporations to a standstill. The same protest ten years from now may not carry anything like the same influence if a significant proportion of that workforce has already been replaced by software, robotics or autonomous systems.
Suddenly the thought experiment is no longer just about profit sharing. It becomes a question of timing. If employees believe the current balance between labour and capital is unsustainable, then the opportunity to influence that balance may not exist indefinitely. Ironically, the very technology that promises extraordinary gains in productivity may also reduce labour’s ability to negotiate how those gains are ultimately distributed.
None of this is really an argument against corporations, or even against AI. AI has the potential to improve healthcare, accelerate scientific discovery, transform education and increase productivity on a scale that is difficult to overstate. Businesses should absolutely embrace those opportunities, just as society has embraced every transformative technology that came before. The challenge is ensuring that the benefits are distributed in ways that strengthen society rather than concentrating an ever larger share of wealth and influence into fewer hands. If AI allows companies to generate dramatically greater profits with dramatically fewer employees, then questions about ownership, profit sharing and economic participation become even more important than they are today.
Which brings us back to where this thought experiment began. If everyone walked away tomorrow, corporations would suffer, economies would suffer and ordinary people would suffer. Some reforms might emerge from the crisis, while others might never materialise. The protest could become one of the most significant demonstrations of collective labour power in history, or it could simply accelerate automation and weaken labour’s long-term position even further. Either outcome forces us to confront the same uncomfortable question. Have we reached our current economic arrangement because it represents the fairest balance between labour and capital, or simply because we’ve become accustomed to it? If AI changes that balance over the next decade, this may not simply be an interesting thought experiment. It may represent the last point in history at which labour possessed enough collective leverage to renegotiate its relationship with capital.