The employment power pendulum is always swinging. Here’s how workers can stay ahead.

A mere three decades later, however, the power pendulum swung back toward workers with The New Deal, which included unemployment relief and minimum wage legislation, among other worker rights. The pendulum swung on and on through the neoliberal markets of the 1970s and the 1990s employment boom.

Which more or less brings us to the post-pandemic present.

“COVID arrived like a meteor killing the dinosaurs,” said Gerald Davis, a professor of business administration at the University of Michigan and author of “The Vanishing American Corporation: Navigating the Hazards of a New Economy.” “It changed the way that companies think about the nature of the employment relationship.”

But while academics and experts agree that the pandemic was an inflection point for American employment, there’s much less concurrence about who actually got the power.

COVID changes

The pandemic era gave us The Great Resignation and The Great Reshuffle, workplace trends that saw a certain type of white-collar worker gain the freedom to quit their job and score higher-paying positions at other companies with relative ease. Millions of US workers quit their jobs during the pandemic market boom, leading to a two-decade-high resignation rate.

Cat Ward, vice president of employer mobilization at employment nonprofit Jobs for the Future, attributed the reshuffling to employers being forced to reckon with a number of sudden changes, including COVID, shifting generational workplace demographics, the rise of artificial intelligence, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) measures.

“We’ve seen this moment over the last four years where there’s been a pretty incredible amount of innovation and change,” Ward said. “Employers have been on their heels to try and adapt to all this change, and that has put more power in the hands of workers.”

Kalleberg, however, suggested the narrative of a pandemic boom in employee power was largely overblown. Sure, some employees were able to work from home. Some employees transitioned into higher-paying roles. But much of the COVID-era shifts in workplace norms were unequally distributed, he said.

“For a moment there, it looked like essential workers were going to get a better break, but that seems to have dissipated,” Kalleberg said.

“People should really be thinking about what it is that humans can uniquely do in the workplace,” Ward said.

But even as machines become ubiquitous, the professional outlook for humans isn’t entirely doom and gloom.

“I’m very impressed by the potential of AI,” Kalleberg said. “It’s going to eliminate jobs, but it’s also going to create many more.”

Artificial intelligence will offer workers endless information at their fingertips, which could eventually give them a leg up in terms of skill-building, he said. Workers who have previously lacked solid skillsets will suddenly be able to use technology to enhance the skills they do have or acquire new ones, according to Kalleberg, who suggested the invention could even be one way of rebuilding the middle class.

If that turns out to be true, it’s only a matter of time before the pendulum swings yet again, and employees take back the power, experts said.

And for America’s millions of workers, that day can’t come soon enough.

“Employers have had their way for a long time,” Kalleberg said.