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Professor Emeritus Paul Osterman wrote: "People who have [disposable jobs] work at an employer's site, but their employer makes no commitment to them regarding career prospects or job security. My research shows that employers treat more than 1 in 3 U.S. workers as disposable. That comes to just under 57 million full- or part-time workers out of the nation's workforce of 162 million."

Professor Emeritus Paul Osterman wrote: "Employers have strong financial incentives to classify workers as independent contractors rather than employees even where the practical reality of the work relationship closely resembles traditional employment. The disputes that have followed reveal not just a legal ambiguity but a policy system struggling to keep pace with how work has actually changed. A straightforward [solution] would be federal adoption of the ABC rule, already in use by over thirty states to define employee status for state employment rules and for programs related to minimum wages, unemployment insurance, and workers' compensation."

In a recent study, professor Kate Kellogg and co-authors focused on a university medical center, NE Health (fictitious name), and a law firm, LegalCo (also fictitious name). They conducted dozens of individual interviews and observed work meetings. The aim was to see how employees used generative AI and the individual and collective consequences of these uses. The observation was unanimous: the adoption of AI invariably led to an intensification of work. 

In an insightful recent post on China's "k-shaped policy regime," professor Yasheng Huang suggested that addressing domestic demand is a political challenge in China because it requires the state to cede power, whereas a supply-side response does not.

Principal research scientist Neil Thompson said that even at tech companies leading on AI development, it is unlikely that workers are being told to simply deploy the tools that are supposed to do some of their work and move on. "It leads to a situation where even if there were real-time savings, it would be sucked up by the changes, and implementing them, and making sure they worked. People assume that 20% less work means four-day weeks. But new work emerges," Thompson said.

Professor Andrew W. Lo and a team of researchers from MIT have looked into the economic challenges of fusion power and built a framework to make it commercially feasible. The framework is technology-agnostic and takes into account the physical inputs needed to build and operate a fusion power plant that is competitive in energy markets. For more on professor Lo's new research, please visit MIT News.