Key insights
- The Acting Labor Secretary addresses concerns about AI-driven layoffs, particularly in the tech sector. While acknowledging the trend, the Secretary emphasizes the need for credible data to determine the true impact of AI versus other business factors. The Department of Labor is focused on equipping workers with AI literacy skills to adapt to changing job roles, rather than widespread job elimination. This suggests a potential drag on US equities as companies invest in AI and restructure workforces.
While the push into further AI adoption has driven a wide trend of layoffs in the tech sector in 2026, Acting US Secretary of Labor Keith Sonderling speaks with Yahoo Finance Senior Reporter Jennifer Schonberger about how his department is examining artificial intelligence's impact on the labor market.
I do want to ask you about the layoffs that we've been seeing across mostly the tech sector as a result of AI. Meta laying off 10% of its workforce, Oracle announcing 20 to 30,000 employees they're going to slash, Coinbase, crypto firm, cutting 14% of their workforce. And now Bed Bath and Beyond saying that there will be a quote significant reduction in head count over the next couple of years. You've studied this before your current position. Is this a precursor of what's to come? Should we expect more job slashing in sectors outside of technology?
No, and you know, what's important to look here is really having credible data from the Department of Labor to seeing why these layoffs are occurring and whether it's related to artificial intelligence or other factors in their businesses is something that we need to lead with. But in the AI space, what we're seeing is an a continued excitement for these investments, but more importantly, our job at the Department of Labor is to make sure that the current workforce and future generations of workers have those AI literacy skills so they can use these tools and without the fear of job displacement and what we truly believe at the end of the day, we're going to just see work changing, not necessarily these jobs completely being eliminated. And that's what we're studying very hard at the Department of Labor.
So it sounds like you're kind of creating sort of a contingency plan if we were to see any short-term disruption as a result of AI in terms of training workers, making sure that there are jobs to match workers who may have been laid off to new job opportunities in the new AI world. Is that is that a correct read?
Well, both. We're actually working with employers to make sure that they have the skills for their they can teach the skills to their employees, so they don't need to lay off their employees. so they can use these products um to the full potential with their workers. And I think that's a part of the conversation that we're trying to change about the potential productivity gains, the protect the potential for work to become even better with uh employees using AI side by side versus employers just thinking they need to use AI. And and we're investing in that uh significantly, both uh for the current work current workers and future generation of workers.
And before I let you go, Mr. Secretary, um, the Wall Street Journal had an article this week about a so-called compute tax, a tax on AI uh would be used to slow down rapid automation to try to upse- um offset potential job losses. What's the Trump administration's position on this?
Um on on that particular uh proposed law, um I haven't studied it. Um I don't have a position on it, but what I can tell you, our position at the Department of Labor is working with both the employers and the employees to find what that balance is for automation, for artificial intelligence, and making sure that workers have these first opportunities to not only use these new technologies, but to for employers to have the resources to skill these employees to be able to use it, so we don't have to have those conversations.