The AI Lie on Labour Day: Who Really Profits — and Who Pays
Dear friends!
Just a day before Labour Day, I am writing on something that concerns me for a long time but is very much missing in most of the AI debates: The effect on the job market, not on the typical, repetitive or simple jobs at risk everyone talks about, but expert IT jobs in particular.
+++ Please also share my LinkedIn post on that here +++
They told us AI would make us all more productive. Freer. More prosperous.
Instead: In February 2026, more than 61,000 IT professionals were registered as unemployed in Germany — up nearly 23 percent year-on-year. Job postings for computer science graduates with a master’s degree or higher have collapsed by 46 percent since 2023. Exactly the skills that everybody told us we need to acquire, today give you the worst chances on the job market.
Meanwhile? Elon Musk, Larry Page and Sergey Brin are the richest people on earth.
That is the business model. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
The Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft (IW Cologne) has run the numbers: open IT positions fell by 26.2 percent in 2024 compared to 2023. Across all other professions, the decline was just 4.4 percent — IT is being hit six times as hard. You can read the study here.
The steepest falls are at the top of the qualification ladder: job postings for IT experts with a master’s degree or diploma dropped by roughly a third in a single year. For computer science specialists the decline was 46.2 percent, for business informatics 38.2 percent.
The youngest are hit hardest. Again.
After COVID and the devastating effect of the wars in Ukraine and Iran on affordability, young people are again hit the hardest. Many feel, rightly, that the world their parents lived in, where they, for example, could build a house from a single income, does no longer exists. The freedom and opportunities have shrunk for many over the last generation. This drives many people into the arms of the far-right and threatens democracy, globally.
Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab analysed payroll records covering millions of workers across thousands of companies (study here). In jobs with high AI exposure — software development, customer support, accounting — employment for 22- to 25-year-olds fell 6 percent between late 2022 and July 2025. Over the same period, employment among workers aged 30 and older in the same fields grew between 6 and 13 percent.
The Stanford researchers describe early-career workers in AI-exposed fields as “canaries in the coal mine” — warning of the potentially destabilising effects AI could have on the labour market going forward.
The AI bosses are betraying young people. They take their jobs away and pay hardly any taxes. They accumulate the wealth that in the previous economy was distributed through jobs.
The AI bosses will tell you: there are other jobs. That is true. Manual jobs, taking care of people. Very important jobs. But how much will they pay in a world without a middle class to pay for them? How much will the care economy pay in a world where the richest companies and the richest people hardly pay any taxes?
Europe should invest in a different model. Invest in smaller AI models. Invest in AI that solves real problems. Invest in AI that doesn’t kill the planet and that’s economically viable.
Work towards an economy that focuses on the people.
AI should be a tool, not the master.
When we take to the streets on Labour Day this Friday, this should be our battle cry.
+++ Please also share my LinkedIn post on that here +++
See you in the streets!
In solidarity,
Your Alexandra Geese