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Reclaiming Worker Power in the Age of AI

When every price and wage is personalized, organizing gets harder. Here’s how we’re fighting back in New York City.

A delivery worker carries a DoorDash bag in New York City, on Tuesday, May 6, 2025.

This year, I broke the Yom Kippur fast the way generations of New Yorkers have—with bagels, lox, and—after checking my receipt—some thoughts about the price of food in this city.

I complained to my friends. But high prices at the Jewish dinner table are nothing new, and perhaps I should have looked to our forebears for some inspiration.

In the spring of 1902, the price of kosher meat on the Lower East Side suddenly jumped by 50 percent—from 12 to 18 cents a pound. Not because of a cattle shortage or drought. A small group of powerful meatpacking companies—the beef trust—had come to dominate the market.

For the Jewish immigrant families packed into the neighborhood’s tenements, that wasn’t just sticker shock. It meant putting less food on the table. But the women responsible for buying and preparing this food did not resign themselves to this price increase. Two women, Fanny Levy and Sarah Edelson, organized their neighbors along Monroe Street door to door. They picketed butcher shops. They took their campaigns into synagogues, climbing onto bimahs during Shabbat services and calling on their communities to join the boycott. They passed out flyers bearing a skull and crossbones and a simple message: “Eat no meat while the Trust is taking meat from the bones of your women and children.”

People listened. The protest grew to involve some 20,000 New Yorkers. Kosher meat sales collapsed. Within weeks, the retail price had fallen from 18 cents to 14 cents a pound.

The women had no control over the meatpacking industry. But they could see what it was doing. The price hike was public. They could compare notes, recognize a shared interest, and organize around a common demand.

Now imagine that same fight unfolding in 2026. Sarah Edelson opens a grocery delivery app and sees a price for meat. Fanny Levy opens the same app and sees another. The woman down the block sees a third.

The company knows what each woman has bought before, where she lives, and what alternatives are nearby. Perhaps it can estimate how urgently she needs to place an order—say, before the Sabbath. Each woman sees only the price offered to her.

Think about what that does to the boycott. Assuming these women even realize they’re being gouged, what price goes on the flyer? What number does Sarah shout from the bimah? How do you organize your neighbors against a price hike when you can’t tell whether they received one?

The beef trust had enormous power. But its power was exercised in a way that people could see and challenge. Today, companies have increasingly sophisticated tools to exercise economic power person by person—consumer by consumer, worker by worker.

The company sees everyone while each of us sees only ourselves. And that gets at what worries me most about how AI is reshaping our economy.

On October 5, representatives from the major AI firms will testify before the New York City Council to quell concerns about human extinction, to walk back their own promises of mass layoffs, and to give their best pitch on why, in Sam Altman’s words, artificial intelligence should be a “utility like electricity or water,” where “people buy it on a meter.”

These representatives will make the case for what this extraordinary technology can do. Our job at the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP) is to ask how it affects the people who have to live with it. That is the work we have been leading since day one of the Mamdani administration—and, as I will outline here, the work we intend to keep doing in the months and years ahead.

I can already predict that one phenomenon the AI companies will focus on—especially if it distracts from their safety record—is the promise of personalization. And you can understand the appeal: Personalized products, personalized services, personalized experiences all sound good. But there is a darker side when companies personalize the terms on which people earn a living or buy the things they need. A price based on the most you are willing to pay. A wage based on the least it thinks you will accept.

Companies, largely unchecked by government, have spent years building the machinery for this: collecting data, tracking behavior, and testing our responses. AI can make that machinery more powerful and expand its reach. Firms can learn from millions of people while keeping each person in the dark about how others are being treated.

Agentic AI could take this individualization further still. These systems promise to do more than recommend a product: They could shop, negotiate, and make purchases on our behalf. That could save people time and help them find better deals. But it also means the products we encounter, the alternatives we consider, and the terms we accept could all be selected through a private exchange between automated systems that no human ever reviews.

That raises basic questions about whose interests these agents serve. Will an agent search for the best deal for its user, or steer them toward a business that pays for placement? What personal information will........

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