From Laundries to Algorithms: What Displaced Workers Build Next

Christopher Green, a local storyteller, blogger, and retired lawyer, recently recounted a grim but revealing episode from the late 19th century: a disgruntled customer shot the owner of a Chinese laundry after claiming he’d received the wrong clothes. The violence was shocking, but what lingered was the broader context behind it—the economic trap Chinese immigrants fell into after the railways were finished.

Brought in as cheap labour to build critical infrastructure, Chinese workers were suddenly expendable once the last spike was driven. They faced open discrimination and were effectively barred from most forms of employment. With no realistic access to established jobs, they did the only thing left: they created their own. Out of necessity, not ideology, they became entrepreneurs.

Two niches emerged. Laundry services and restaurants—industries shunned by others, low-margin, labour-intensive, and culturally distinct. Chinese immigrants didn’t just survive in these spaces; they professionalized them. They made laundry affordable and ubiquitous. They introduced cuisines that eventually became staples of North American cities. What began as economic exile became a long-term economic contribution.

Fast forward to today, and the echoes are uncomfortable. Artificial intelligence is rapidly eliminating jobs built on routine cognitive and physical tasks—data entry, basic analysis, customer support, logistics coordination, even junior professional roles. Like the railway workers, many people are discovering that the skills they were trained for are no longer wanted at scale.

The parallel is striking. Once again, a large segment of the workforce is being displaced not by failure, but by progress. And once again, traditional employment pathways are narrowing just as the disruption accelerates.

So where do today’s displaced workers go?

History suggests the answer won’t come from permission, credentials, or institutions. It will come from necessity-driven entrepreneurship. New niches are already forming: human-centered services AI can’t replicate easily—relationship management, trust-based advising, facilitation, community building, experiential learning, care work, ethical oversight, creative synthesis, and local services layered with technology rather than replaced by it.

Just as laundries and restaurants once sat outside the mainstream economy, tomorrow’s growth niches may look unimpressive at first. They may be fragmented, underpaid, or culturally undervalued—until someone figures out how to make them scalable, trusted, and essential.

The lesson from history is blunt but hopeful: when systems close doors, people don’t stop working—they start building. The question isn’t whether displaced workers will find new markets. It’s the overlooked niches that will quietly become the foundations of the next economy.

#Labour Displacement, #Pivoting, #Christopher Green, #AI Job Replacment, #Joseph Willmott, #buildacash cow

Joseph Willmott, CEO of World Referral Network

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jwillmott@worldreferralnetwork.com

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https://www.linkedin.com/in/joseph-willmott-0a746b/

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