Work as Distribution Infrastructure: Participation in AI-Led Growth Beyond Employment

Employment is commonly treated as a source of labor income, but in modern market economies a stable job often performs a much larger distributive function. It provides current earnings, produces human capital, anchors access to social insurance and retirement saving, supports credit and asset accumulation, and gives households a recurring claim on the gains generated by productive firms. This paper develops the concept of Work as Distribution Infrastructure by formalizing an argument introduced in Kao (2026): when firms can produce more value with fewer additional workers, the economic importance of employment extends beyond the number of jobs at risk. The question becomes how productivity gains continue to reach households when job growth is a weaker transmission mechanism.

The paper distinguishes three participation channels. Work connects households to growth through wages, experience, and employment-linked benefits. Ownership connects them through returns to productive assets, directly or through pensions, funds, employee financial participation, and other intermediated forms. Creation connects them through entrepreneurship and the formation of new products, firms, and positions. These channels are complements rather than substitutes. Ownership does not replace the developmental and social functions of work, and entrepreneurship cannot be a universal solution. The framework therefore treats distribution infrastructure as a portfolio of institutional connections rather than a single policy instrument.

Korea provides a useful motivating case. Its growth model historically linked industrial expansion, large-firm employment, skill formation, and household advancement, while current household balance sheets remain concentrated in real assets. At the same time, AI may raise the return to capital, alter the labor share, and lower some organizational barriers to small-team production. The contribution is not a policy prescription for universal asset ownership or startup formation. It is a diagnostic framework for asking whether AI-led productivity growth remains broadly connected to household income, capability accumulation, and claims on future economic value.