Who is most afraid of AI taking their job? In this special edition of The Week in Jobs, Pete and Peter walk through 4 Corner Resources’ Q4 2026 Employee Mindset Survey, the fourth and final quarterly edition of the year, and the answers surprised them: IT workers, the highest earners, and women, who now worry about AI more than men do. The survey tracks how American workers earning $50,000 or more feel about their jobs, their confidence in the 2026 job market, and the threat of AI. The overall mindset score, job satisfaction, and employee confidence all edged up, and so did the perceived AI threat, though by less than Pete expected a year ago.

One in three IT workers name AI as the biggest threat to their job, compared with 16.2% of workers in all other professions combined. The highest earners are the most worried about AI’s impact on their careers, a jump this quarter, which fits a pattern Pete and Peter see all year: the people who use AI the most worry about it the most. The share of women who see AI as a significant career risk rose from about 16% in January to almost 24%, while the share of men edged down. Entry-level workers are less afraid of AI, even though Pete believes it is hitting them hardest, a finding neither host could fully explain.

The biggest move of the year belongs to entry-level job market confidence. In January, 13% of entry-level workers said they were unconfident about the job market over the next six to 12 months. Now it is 30%, more than double. Workers ages 18 to 29 are the most frustrated group in the survey, with 53.6% expecting to leave their job within two years or already looking. Pete and Peter warn of a squeeze: baby boomers are retiring in large numbers while the entry-level pipeline stays shut, which they say will leave a leadership gap down the road.

The survey also shows a K-shaped economy at the worker level. Lower earners are more worried about the job market than people in households earning over $100,000, and higher earners are building savings cushions while lower earners are not. Men are saving at a much higher rate than women, which Pete and Peter wonder may be tied to the AI worry gap.

On return to office, the share of workers required to be in the office climbed from 51% at the start of the year to nearly 60%, yet it bothers workers less than it did earlier in the year. Pete and Peter’s read: workers are accepting it because they have little leverage in a low hire, low fire market. Distrust of official government job market data also rose, from about 20% in January to 29%.

Their overall verdict for 2026: the year that could have been worse.

See the full results and the year’s trend data at 4cornerresources.com under the Survey tab. New episodes of The Week in Jobs every Friday.

The Trump administration took its H-1B crackdown public this week. At a press conference, JD Vance named eight companies (Microsoft, Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, HCL, and Capgemini), and the Department of Labor suspended their use of the PERM program indefinitely, cutting them off from a key step in sponsoring H-1B workers for green cards. PERM is the process that lets H-1B workers stay beyond six years and apply for permanent residency. Vance said the eight companies have received more than 230,000 H-1B approvals and more than 100,000 permanent labor certifications since 2009, and that Microsoft laid off 6,000 workers last year while receiving 6,300 H-1B visas and nearly 3,000 green cards. Microsoft says roughly 80% of those were existing employees renewing or extending their status.

Pete and Peter back the move and call it long overdue. Most of the named firms are consultancies built around filing H-1Bs and placing workers at other companies, while Microsoft and Adobe happen to be two of the largest direct employers of H-1B workers. They also point out that the program is hard on the visa holders themselves, who often cannot leave a sponsoring employer without risking deportation. And they say offshoring, like last week’s DoorDash story, deserves the same scrutiny, since both let companies avoid hiring American workers. Their hope: the policy outlasts the next election.

Pete and Peter also meet a brand-new workplace term, “loud working,” from a Business Insider article. It is the opposite of quiet quitting: making sure your manager sees everything you are doing. Their verdict is that it is just smart career advice with a trendy name, as long as it does not turn into playing politics instead of doing good work.

Layoffs are back in the headlines. HubSpot is cutting roughly 600 jobs and Amazon announced more cuts, both citing a push to remove layers of middle management, and neither named AI as a reason. Surveillance camera company Flock cut about 18% of its staff, a few hundred people, in what has been attributed to public backlash against the company.

They close with a survey finding that 90% of workers say their employers expect more loyalty than they give back. Also in the results: 71% say companies focus more on profits than on employees compared with five years ago, only 4% say less, and 49% of workers who are not actively job hunting would still take a call from a recruiter. Pete and Peter’s take is that loyalty is the wrong word for the employment relationship, and they have a message for hiring managers: a team that looks happy may still be open to other offers.

Visit 4cornerresources.com for hiring and job search resources.

The September jobs report came in far below expectations this week: the BLS reported only 29,000 jobs added, well short of the roughly 90,000 both ADP and the consensus forecast had pointed to. Previous months were also revised down a combined 60,000 jobs, and July's number has now flipped from a loss to a gain and back to a loss again in three separate revisions. Pete and Peter say the back-and-forth has gotten so extreme that the headline numbers are losing credibility by the month.

The harder story inside the report: unemployment rose from 4.1% to 4.2%, its first increase in a while, and unemployment among 20-to-24-year-olds is now at 8%. The number of people seeking their first job climbed to 818,000, up 116,000 from the prior reading. Pete and Peter tie this directly to an Arkansas welfare ad that ran this week, one that used a young man playing video games as the face of a "typical" welfare recipient to promote new work requirements. Given what the data actually shows about how hard it is for young job seekers to find work right now, Pete and Peter call the ad out as badly timed and out of touch.

They also cover DoorDash's announcement of a new 3,000-person customer support and admin center in India, one of more than 2,100 similar centers now operating there. Costco, McDonald's, Charles Schwab, and Southwest Airlines have all opened comparable offshore centers recently. Pete and Peter question why this kind of offshoring, unlike manufacturing jobs moving overseas, draws so little public attention or political pressure to bring the work back to the US.

Elsewhere: Glassdoor's worker confidence index hit its third record low of 2026, with workers' six-month outlook dropping to 42.9%. Small businesses with fewer than 10 employees pulled back hiring the hardest this month, even as many of them say they still can't find qualified candidates, a disconnect Pete and Peter attribute partly to job seekers gravitating toward recognizable brand names over smaller companies that don't typically use outside recruiting help.

They close with California's newly signed "No Robo Bosses" law, which bars employers from firing or disciplining workers based solely on an automated decision starting in July 2027, and LinkedIn's CEO predicting that AI will eventually touch every job in some form. That echoes a bigger claim Elon Musk has made repeatedly: that robots and AI will eventually do all the work, and universal basic income will make everyone rich as a result. Pete and Peter aren't buying it, and they question how "everyone gets rich" squares with basic supply and demand.

Looking to hire or find your next role? Visit 4cornerresources.com.

A viral debate broke out this week after a Miami-based TikTok recruiter posted that candidates shouldn't bring an iced latte to a job interview, splitting opinion mostly along generational lines. Pete and Peter land firmly on the side of leaving the drink at home. It might not affect your qualifications, but if even a portion of interviewers see it as unprofessional, it's a risk with no upside.

They also dig into the growing problem of fake recruiter profiles on LinkedIn, timed perfectly with a real example: a candidate emailed 4 Corner Resources this week asking to verify a "recruiter" who turned out to be a fake profile with no connection to the company, one of dozens 4CR has found impersonating it over the years. One fake profile claims to have worked at 4CR since November 2016. A researcher named Jay Jones has tracked more than 60,000 fake job postings and flagged about 7,000 scam recruiter profiles on his own. Pete and Peter argue LinkedIn could shut this down easily (it used to be simple to delete fake accounts) but has little incentive to, since fake profiles inflate its own user numbers. They also connect it to a tougher stat: long-term unemployment continues to climb, and only about one in seven people out of work for 27 weeks or longer land a job in a given month, making job seekers even more vulnerable to scams promising an easy way back in.

On a lighter note, a Wall Street Journal story on companies using AI to help set employee raises got an ominous headline, but Pete and Peter say the practice isn't new. Companies have used market pay data for years (career sites like CareerBuilder built entire products around it), and AI is simply a faster way to gather the same information.

A new Owl Labs survey on hybrid work turned up a surprising number: 47% of workers say they'd take a pay cut of 10% or more in exchange for flexible hours, and 39% would turn down a job outright if it required full-time office work. Pete and Peter debate whether that's a reasonable stance for office workers to take, especially with a fresh report showing AI is hitting recent college grads hardest: employment for 20-to-25-year-olds in highly AI-exposed fields fell 4.4% over the past year, the 35th straight month of decline.

They close with a preview of next week's data-heavy schedule: the JOLTS report on Tuesday, ADP's private payroll report, and the big monthly jobs report at week's end, along with their predictions for what the numbers will show.

Looking to hire or find your next role? Visit 4cornerresources.com

GM's CEO made headlines this week telling high school students to pick up a wrench instead of heading to college, and Pete and Peter agree with the broader point (the US is projected to face a shortage of over 2 million skilled trades workers by 2030), but they're skeptical of the messenger. GM has laid off plenty of trades workers over the years, and the numbers complicate the pitch: the average mechanic salary is $44,890 a year, a certified mechanic averages $63,807, and a journeyman electrician averages around $63,626. Solid pay, but not the kind of money that easily supports a family the way it once did. Pete and Peter's take: if the country needs more trades workers, trade pay and trade school access need to improve too, or people will keep choosing college. They also question how many of these jobs survive the next decade of automation, given robots are already building cars at scale at Tesla and Hyundai.

A Bureau of Labor Statistics report caught Pete and Peter's attention this week: the cost of employee benefits (Social Security, Medicare, healthcare, and more) for private industry workers has climbed from under $10 an hour a decade ago to more than $17 an hour today. That's a steep cost increase for employers, on top of already-rising wages, and Pete and Peter argue it's one more incentive pushing companies toward automation over hiring.

There's better news on the AI front. Indeed Hiring Labs found that wages for the most AI-exposed jobs (software engineering, IT, data and analytics, marketing, and banking and finance) have climbed 46% since 2021, with job postings in those fields growing too. Morgan Stanley found something similar: the most AI-exposed households are best positioned for wage growth. The catch, according to Indeed's own data, is that openings are skewing toward more senior, experienced hires, making it harder for entry-level workers to break in.

The bigger, longer-running story: the share of US economic output going to workers has fallen to 52%, the lowest level ever recorded, down from a historical range closer to 60-66%. The decline started around 2000, stalled briefly after 2010, and has picked up speed again in the past few years. Pete and Peter aren't ready to blame AI alone, but they expect it to accelerate the trend.

They close with two hiring-process stories: Challenger, Gray & Christmas warns that AI is increasingly summarizing and rating recorded job interviews before a human ever reviews them (70% of employers already use AI somewhere in hiring, according to TestGorilla), and a Morning Brew report on companies asking candidates to complete unpaid work trials, in some cases for a full week. Pete and Peter's advice: know your worth in the market, and don't do unpaid work beyond an hour or two without getting paid for it.

Looking to hire or find your next role? Visit 4cornerresources.com.

The BLS report from last Friday held a detail Pete and Peter didn't catch the first time around: of the 162,000 jobs added in August, 158,000 went to women, about 97% of the total. Women now hold slightly more than half of all payroll jobs in the US, only the third time that's happened in history. The gains came almost entirely from healthcare, education, and hospitality, all women-dominated fields, while male-dominated sectors like transportation and technology declined. Men's labor force participation dropped from 67.9% to 67.2% over the same period, a shift Pete and Peter attribute partly to baby boomer men retiring out of the workforce.

They also cover a Richmond Fed report showing more Americans are working two jobs than at any point in the last 26 years, a trend that lines up with this week's inflation numbers: wages rose 3.1% while prices climbed 3.4%. About half of multiple job holders have a college degree, undercutting the idea that a second job is a young or unskilled worker's problem.

On AI, a former Anthropic employee's viral tweet claiming the industry is "dooming" society, along with another Anthropic employee's public estimate of a greater than 10% chance AI causes human extinction within a decade, dominated headlines this week. Pete and Peter treat both claims with some skepticism given who's making them, but agree the underlying concern about AI's pace isn't unfounded. They also cover Orlando's new robotaxi rollout, a protest by 30 robots in Poland demanding AI regulation (organized, oddly, by a man who owns both a robotics company and a staffing agency), and Bernie Sanders' proposed "AI sovereignty fund," which would compensate the public for the data used to train AI models.

Elsewhere: small businesses are still struggling to fill open roles, and Pete and Peter say the real problem is finding candidates willing to work for a company outside the well-known brand names, not pay. And the Trump administration is moving to eliminate the 60-day grace period H-1B visa holders currently get after losing a job, a change that would put visa holders at risk of near-immediate deportation if it goes through.

Visit www.4cornerresources.com for hiring and job search resources.

Pete and Peter share the results of 4 Corner Resources' Q3 2026 Employee Mindset Survey, the third quarterly edition of a study tracking how American workers feel about their jobs, their financial confidence, and AI. The headline finding cuts against a lot of what's in the news: the overall mindset score sits at 67.3 out of 100, and 81% of full-time workers say they're satisfied or extremely satisfied with their current job.

Satisfaction isn't showing up in paychecks, though. Real average hourly wages actually fell 0.2% year over year as of July, even as people report feeling better about their jobs. Pete and Peter's read: workers see how hard the job market is right now and are grateful to have something stable, even if pay isn't keeping pace. The one place satisfaction clearly splits is work arrangement: workers stuck in a setup they didn't choose (mostly return-to-office mandates) score about 20 points lower than those working the way they want to, even though most aren't ready to quit over it yet.

Employee confidence is actually trending up, which surprised both hosts, but it comes with a serious caveat: workers report having only about four months of savings on average if they lost their job, and 22.1% have no savings at all. The gender gap is stark: 15% of men report zero savings, compared to 30% of women.

On AI, the fear factor has stayed flat all year at 15% of workers naming it as the top threat to their career, a group made up entirely of full-time, mid-to-high earners, not entry-level or gig workers. The most striking finding: the people who use AI the most are also the ones most worried about it. Roughly half of respondents think AI will actually help their career, making sentiment on AI more split than panicked.

4 Corner Resources runs this survey every quarter. The next edition comes out in early October, just ahead of the November election. See the full results and historical data at www.4cornerresources.com under the Surveys tab.

The BLS reported 162,000 jobs added in August, about triple the 55,000 forecast, plus a rare upward revision to prior months. Pete and Peter are skeptical, since downward revisions happen roughly 90% of the time. ADP's competing report told a very different story: private employers added just 38,000 jobs, the slowest month since January, and while the BLS reported 16,000 new manufacturing jobs, ADP reported a decline of 17,000. Pete and Peter can't reconcile the two, and neither can point to which source is right.

They also dig into where the BLS job growth actually came from: a large share was government hiring, and about a third, 59,000 jobs, came from food service and drinking places, meaning restaurants, bars, and coffee shops. Not exactly the high-wage growth the economy needs.

The bigger concern this week: long-term unemployment. Only 14.3% of people who've been out of work for six months or more find a job in a given month, roughly one in seven, even though the headline unemployment rate sits at a healthy-looking 4.1%. Pete and Peter also talk about hiring bias creeping back for candidates with employment gaps or frequent job changes, a pattern that eased during COVID but has firmly returned.

They close with Uber's decision to cut 10% of its roughly 34,000-person workforce, about 3,300 people, with 20% of those cuts hitting management seven or more layers below the CEO. Uber says it's pure restructuring, not AI, making it one of the only major layoffs this year not blamed on automation.

Looking to hire or find your next role? Visit 4cornerresources.com.