27-02-2025
How AI, federal job cuts could impact Black workforce
(NewsNation) — Martin Luther King Jr. addressed a crowded room of union workers back in 1961, warning the rise of automation would disproportionately impact African Americans in the auto industry.
'Automation cannot be permitted to become a blind monster which grinds out more cars and simultaneously snuffs out the hopes and lives of the people by whom the industry was built,' he said.
Nearly half a century later, as the Association for the Study of African American Life and History celebrates its 2025 Black History Month theme, 'African Americans and Labor,' artificial intelligence is stoking similar fears.
'I feel that kind of the next large struggle for, especially the Black labor force in the country, is in these ongoing discussions around artificial intelligence and how it'll impact the American workforce at large,' said Christian Collins, a policy analyst at The Center for Law and Social Policy.
He told NewsNation the tenets of King's speech ring true today, including that tech innovations like AI cut costs without 'concern for the humanity of the workers.'
'The indispensable nature of Black labor has always been requisite to the development and wealth of the United States, to the point that it is valued more than the lives of the Black people performing the work,' Collins wrote earlier this February.
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In 2024, nearly 60% of U.S. companies implemented software, equipment or technology to automate tasks previously done by employees, a survey from Duke University and the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta and Richmond found.
Goldman Sachs estimates that 'roughly two-thirds of current jobs are exposed to some degree of AI automation.'
Collins and other experts worry that AI — and federal job cuts from the Trump administration — will impact the Black workforce disproportionately.
King's automation concerns were mainly targeted toward blue-collar workers, but the newest tech innovations are putting white-collar jobs at risk as well.
Tasks in office and administrative support roles — bookkeepers, customer service representatives, office clerks — are especially likely to be automated, a recent Brookings Institution report posited.
Other professions like insurance underwriters, tax preparers and legal secretaries also face high automation risk.
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Estimates from the McKinsey Global Institute point to the overrepresentation of African Americans in three categories — office support, food services and production work — all of which are likely to be first displaced.
The institute's calculations found that African Americans have one of the highest rates of potential job loss by 2030, with a 23.1% displacement rate.
'Even though AI is such a popular topic now and has been for quite some time, that's not really what's being discussed, either publicly in regards to AI or, honestly, even in some of the private policy decision rooms,' Collins said.
President Donald Trump and his tech billionaire ally Elon Musk, head of the Department of Government Efficiency, have targeted civil servants in an effort to slash federal workforce sizes.
DOGE launched an overhaul of government to save what he claims could be trillions of dollars. The Trump administration faces a myriad of legal challenges questioning the White House's unilateral ability to cut spending.
Dr. Danielle Phillips-Cunningham, an associate professor of labor studies and employment relations at Rutgers University, said the recent orders have 'significantly rolled back and threatened' what 'Black labor leaders fought for.'
'The targeting of federal workers is a targeting of Black people,' Phillips-Cunningham said. 'As we know, people from many different races are employed by the federal government, but the federal government is an area of employment where a lot of Black people work.'
Pew Research data shows that the federal workforce relatively mirrors the overall workforce makeup, though with two notable exceptions: A bigger share of federal workers are Black — 18.6% compared to 12.8% nationally, while a smaller share is Hispanic or Latino (10.5% vs. 19.5%).
Phillips-Cunningham said some of the president's orders violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964, specifically in regard to employment discrimination.
'This is why labor organizers and labor unions are at the forefront of lawsuits filed against the presidential administration,' she explained. 'Because a lot of what labor leaders have fought for are being threatened and dismantled as we speak.'
NewsNation's Michael Ramsey and Andrew Dorn contributed to this report.
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