AI is driving higher margins across companies, and workers are already seeing the gap between those swollen profits and their paychecks. The first major labor fight over AI's windfall has already played out in South Korea, while California is moving to explore the next one.
Who Gets the Windfall
In Seoul, Samsung Electronics struck an 11th-hour deal with its union, averting an 18-day strike over AI profit-sharing. The deal came after workers pushed into a fight over who gets paid when AI boosts margins, a question that is now moving from boardrooms into labor disputes. The article says this is not just a problem for big AI companies; any company driving higher margins using AI could find itself in the crosshairs.
The Samsung fight shows the basic hierarchy at work: management and shareholders sit atop the machine, while workers are left to chase a share of the gains after the fact. The strike threat forced a deal, but only after an 18-day confrontation over how AI profits would be divided. That is the kind of bargaining that happens when the people doing the work have to fight for a slice of the value they helped create.
California's Managed Response
In Sacramento, Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered California to study universal basic capital, giving workers equity stakes in the AI economy. Axios says OpenAI and Anthropic have floated similar ideas themselves, assuming profits soar. The proposal is framed as a way to share AI-related gains, but it remains a study ordered from above, inside the same political apparatus that has to manage the fallout from corporate concentration.
The article places this alongside the Samsung deal as part of a broader pattern: the first labor fight over AI's windfall has already happened, and the next one is being prepared in California. The question is not whether AI will enrich companies; it already is. The question is who gets to claim the surplus, and whether workers will have to keep forcing the issue through strikes and pressure while officials study the problem.
The Next Front in the Workplace
Unionized workforces are expected to strike first, with South Korea, Germany and Japan described as the leading edge. The article says UAW and CWA are presumably studying the Samsung playbook now. That means the labor response is already being treated as a template, not a one-off, because workers are watching the same margin expansion and asking why the bosses get the upside while pay stays pinned down.
Non-union workers, meanwhile, are expected to use the tools against employers. Glassdoor, Blind and AI-built comp benchmarks are making pay transparency unavoidable and exploitable. In other words, the information that used to be hidden behind corporate secrecy is becoming harder to control, and workers can use it to compare, organize, and push back against wage suppression.
The article also says boards will get pulled in, and that "AI productivity dividend" is expected to become a 2026 proxy season demand from both labor and activist investors. That puts the issue directly into the machinery of corporate governance, where workers and investors both press claims on the same profits while the companies try to keep control of the distribution.
The political class is already preparing its own version of the story. Democrats are likely to champion plans to share AI-related profits as part of their 2028 campaigns, and the article says this will resonate with MAGA leaders like Steve Bannon, too. The same profit-sharing language is being folded into election-season messaging, where politicians promise to manage the damage without touching the underlying power structure that lets AI enrich the top in the first place.
What emerges from the article is a familiar pattern: AI raises margins, workers notice the gap, unions strike, officials order studies, and politicians start packaging the conflict for future campaigns. The machinery keeps running, but the people at the bottom are the ones forced to fight for any share of what it produces.