Whom is AI replacing? We deserve to know.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill

This year, there has been an ever-growing list of companies making significant workforce reductions. Snapchat’s owner cut 16 percent of employees. Block Inc., parent company of Square and Cash App, eliminated a staggering 40 percent. Most recently, Meta shed 10 percent. This trend even prompted the Wall Street Journal to question whether the U.S. has entered the era of the “mega-layoff.”

For the most part, these layoffs are excitedly explained to investors. The expensive employees are being replaced by cheaper AI, and the cuts will supposedly free up capital for more investments into technology.

Although companies boast in detail about innovation, they are curiously silent about which workers are paying the costs. That silence matters. If AI is fundamentally changing the labor market, then we need to know, in real time, which jobs are being eliminated, so that society can adapt. Firms should therefore be required to publicly disclose which jobs are being eliminated due to AI as soon as it happens.

There is a great debate about the impact of AI on society. In Silicon Valley, there are fears of mass white collar firings and a need for universal basic income. Shedding millions of jobs would create economic disparity and labor market distress like the world has never seen. We are at the beginning of that potential transition.

We can still take actions that would lead to an easier landing. Part of those actions needs to be creating transparency into how the job market is actually changing. Accurate, timely information about which roles are being displaced would allow workers to retrain toward marketable skillsets, let universities steer students into majors with better employment outcomes and enable policymakers to spot concentrations of disruption before they turn into crises.

Right now, in the U.S., firms are required by law to disclose the scale and timing of layoffs through WARN notices, and through 8-K filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission for public companies conducting large scale layoffs.

The WARN notices are procedural and announce headcounts, severance dates and site locations. The 8-Ks typically emphasize restructuring charges and cash impacts. Firms are not required to disclose which types of employees were cut and do not so voluntarily. In an era when entire job categories could be eliminated by AI, these barebones public disclosures are not enough.

Requiring transparent role-level disclosure is practical and low-cost. Firms already classify employees for compliance and reporting in several different ways. They have federally regulated categories for both Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Census requirements. Beyond that, they already have the job postings they used to hire for the roles, so they have already classified and described the roles publicly that are being eliminated. They have internal human resources taxonomies and job titles for every role, too.

Regulators could mandate that WARN notices include standardized occupation codes and a short description of the jobs affected. Additionally, they should include the demographics of who is being affected, by gender, race and age, so that policymakers can better understand if any groups are being affected differently.

Critics will object that these types of disclosures are too costly, but the benefits of having a healthier labor market outweigh the costs of compliance. Unlike other types of regulation, which ask firms to create new data where none existed before, firms would not need to create any new information beyond what they already have done for previous compliance and hiring purposes. It would just be a matter of sharing the data publicly.

As a society, we need to work to maximize innovation in AI while also smoothing the transition for affected workers as much as possible. Because scholars, employees and policymakers are blind to which jobs are being impacted, they are taking actions based on fears and hypotheticals.

But if the U.S. were to require richer layoff notices, we could make common sense policies based on real-time economic data about the impact on the labor market.

Lisa LaViers is an assistant professor of accounting at Tulane’s A.B. Freeman School of Business. She studies how accounting regulation impacts labor rights.