2026 NAACP Labor Award Recipient

Keeper of the Flame, Keeper of the Future I am honored to accept the 2026 Benjamin L. Hooks Keeper of the Flame Award from the NAACP National Labor Committee .

I receive this recognition with gratitude, humility, and responsibility.

Benjamin L. Hooks stood in a tradition that understood a truth too many institutions still resist: civil rights and labor rights cannot be separated . If a person has dignity, then that dignity must follow them into the workplace. If a person has standing, then that standing must extend into the systems that profit from their labor. If a person has rights, then those rights must matter not only in law and principle, but in economics.

That is the spirit in which I accept this award.

I also accept it at a moment when the definition of labor is being contested in real time.

For generations, workers were told that labor meant the hours they could prove, the motions they could document, the products they could hold, the output an employer could count. But today, in the AI economy, value is increasingly generated in ways that do not fit those old categories. Our actions, choices, preferences, corrections, movements, relationships, histories, and digital traces are constantly being absorbed into productive systems. These systems call us users while using us. They call our contribution data while pricing it as if it appeared by magic.

My book, Your Data, Their Wealth: The Price of Human Input to the AI Economy , and our recent paper, “The Two Faces of the Invisible Economy: Pricing Personal Data Inputs and Measuring Machine Labor Outputs in the AI Economy,” make a simple argument with far-reaching consequences: