The Worst-Case Future for White-Collar Workers

The well-off have no experience with the job market that might be coming.

White-collar workers are getting nervous, with good reason. Sure, 98 percent of college graduates who want a job still have one, and wages are ticking up. Sure, some companies that cite the labor-saving, efficiency-promoting effects of ChatGPT and Claude as they let employees go are just “AI washing”—talking about algorithms to distract from poor managerial decisions.

But the labor market for office workers is beginning to shift. Americans with a bachelor’s degree account for a quarter of the unemployed, a record. High-school graduates are finding jobs quicker than college graduates, an unprecedented trend. Occupations susceptible to AI automation have seen sharp spikes in joblessness. Businesses really are shrinking payroll and cutting costs as they deploy AI. In recent weeks, Baker McKenzie, a white-shoe law firm, axed 700 employees, Salesforce sacked hundreds of workers, and the auditing firm KPMG negotiated lower fees with its own auditor. Two CNBC reporters with no engineering experience “vibe-coded” a clone of Monday.com’s workflow-management platform in less than an hour. When they released their story, Monday.com’s stock tanked.