While the Global North debates the future of white-collar work, the "Artificial" in AI is already being powered by a massive, often invisible human workforce. Behind every safe, helpful chatbot there are hundreds of human beings — almost exclusively in the Global South — performing the essential, high-stakes work of data labeling and content moderation critical for creating safe AI tools. This session examines the AI value chain as a form of global infrastructure: who builds it, under what conditions, and with what stake in its governance. As AI moves from experimental to essential, how do we ensure the people building its foundations are not left in the shadows? The architecture of AI governance is being written now; the question is whether the workers powering it will benefit from it. The session will analyze the current state of play and what we can expect in the future, both at the grassroots and international level, bringing together the voices of workers organizing for dignity, the AI labs building the frontier, and the policymakers setting the rules. Furthermore, the session moves from diagnosis to architecture – mapping concrete pathways from local worker empowerment to global safety standards and asking what it would take to make the human foundations of the AI economy visible, valued, and protected.