Disposable: AI Made It Easier to Say Goodbye
MIT emeritus professor Paul Osterman does — and his estimate is precise enough to be uncomfortable: 35% of workers in advanced economies are already treated as disposable by their employers, before artificial intelligence accelerates the trend further.
Disposable: AI Made It Easier to Say Goodbye
The nurse who drives forty minutes to her shift does not think of herself as a labour market variable. MIT emeritus professor Paul Osterman does — and his estimate is precise enough to be uncomfortable: 35% of workers in advanced economies are already treated as disposable by their employers, before artificial intelligence accelerates the trend further. That number is not a forecast. It is a present-tense diagnosis, and it lands differently when you set it against Malta's labour market, where the post-pandemic tightness that briefly gave workers leverage is quietly loosening.
What AI is doing to employment is not one thing. It is arriving in three waves — before the job, reshaping what skills employers will even consider; during it, monitoring and restructuring how work gets done; and after, making the decision to eliminate a role faster, cheaper, and easier to justify on a spreadsheet. For the Maltese professional navigating a job market still dominated by financial services, iGaming, and a growing digital services corridor, the middle wave is the most treacherous. The worker who interprets data, exercises judgement, handles ambiguity — that person still has a seat at the table. The worker who processes, verifies, and files in predictable sequence is already being repriced.
This is not abstract. Malta's HR & Payroll structures have not yet caught up with what the job market is actually demanding. Employers are hiring for adaptability and then paying for seniority. The gap between what the market needs and what it compensates for creates exactly the conditions Osterman is describing — a workforce that is technically employed but economically precarious, one restructuring away from disposability.
What the Forbes analysis adds, and what most Maltese coverage of the AI-and-jobs story consistently misses, is the leverage dimension. Workers have always had some power in a tight labour market. AI compresses that power not by replacing all workers but by making the threat of replacement credible in more roles, at more levels, more quickly. The employer who once needed six months to retrain a department now needs six weeks. The worker who once had institutional knowledge as a defence now has it eroded by systems that retain and replicate that knowledge without the salary attached.
One detail that will not appear in the headline cycle: the most vulnerable cohort in Malta right now is not the junior employee without credentials. It is the mid-career professional — forty-one, ten years in, solid performance record — whose role sits precisely in the band where AI tools are most cost-effective to deploy. They are not struggling. They are not yet alarmed. That is what makes the moment so quiet and so serious.
The Malta salary guide will tell you what the market pays. It will not tell you how long it intends to keep paying it.
