Ask HN: Do you think the mass layoffs will lead to any broader labor movements?

For the last decade or two, tech workers have enjoyed the easy money of speculation bubbles and widespread investments, from tiny startups flush with cash to huge companies with nearly infinite resources. Seems like that era has come to an end, and what's left of the capital has moved towards AI instead.

The tech sector has also traditionally been averse to labor organizing, with unions far and few in between. Understandably, nobody really cared about them when you could make 6 figures working 4 days a week from home straight out of boot camp, and double your salary every few years just by changing companies.

Well, that world's gone now, with hundreds of thousands of jobs gone and probably never to return. Employers and capitalists have their pick from the best of the best, while the average and below-average workers have been unemployed/underemployed for months.

To me this feels not that different from previous boom and bust cycles in, say, coal or manufacturing or cars or other industry, with a generation of workers displaced and very few re-skilling options available to them. I can't imagine most of those laid off becoming ML engineers within a reasonable timeframe.

So, what's next? Do you think this will lead to any sort of broader labor changes, either grassroots from the workers themselves, government interventions, local cooperatives, or anything at all? Or will we just continue on as before, finding jobs here and there where we can, hoping for another upturn, chasing the next bubble before it bursts, driving for Uber in the meantime?

Demographically, I wonder if this will also lead to US tech workers feeling more empathy with displaced red-state workers who saw similar career losses in the years prior, falling off the middle-class ladder seemingly overnight with no way to climb back up. No matter one's job, it's not a fun country to be unemployed (and unemployable) in.

Just thinking out loud here. What do you think?