The Structural Flaw — Why the Industrial Labour Contract Cannot Regulate Post-Industrial Knowledge Work — and Why Quantitative Easing and Agentic AI Have Made the Problem Visible

ABSTRACT The post-industrial employment contract was inherited from an industrial regime in which the worker's economic contribution coincided temporally with the execution of work. In knowledge-intensive firms the contract conflates rent on current labour with rent on accumulated intellectual capital that the worker has previously transferred to organisational systems, processes and, more recently, artificial-intelligence agents. We argue that this conflation is a structural feature of the contract itself and that two recent macroeconomic developments — Quantitative Easing during 2008–2024 and the deployment of generative and autonomous artificial intelligence from approximately 2024 — have made the feature empirically visible without being its origin. Using a balanced panel of 82 large European listed firms across twelve countries over 2005–2019, we identify a Labour Liability Restructuring channel: firms in the top quartile of QE exposure increased the probability of senior early-retirement schemes by 4.2 percentage points (a 48 per cent increase over the baseline mean), with the effect concentrating in high-AEI sectors and robust across five heterogeneity-robust difference-in-differences estimators. We introduce the Algorithmic Expropriation Index over 47,810 O*NET task statements and validate it against the AIOE benchmark. Calibrated microsimulation on Spanish administrative data implies a fiscal externality of approximately €142,000 per displaced senior worker. We discuss three operating institutional precedents — Writers Guild separated rights, the German Arbeitnehmererfindungsgesetz, and the Bayh-Dole Act — that legitimise an extension of employee residual rights to algorithmically codifiable knowledge work. JEL codes: J24, J26, J63, J64; E52; G32; K31. Version notes (v5.7.1, 2026-05-21): Refactored from v5.4 for submission to Labour Economics (Elsevier). Major changes: (i) institutional implications rebuilt around three operating legal precedents (Writers Guild separated rights, German Arbeitnehmererfindungsgesetz, Bayh-Dole Act), replacing the smart-contract/tokenisation framing of v5.4 — now developed in a separate companion paper; (ii) panel period anchored at 2005–2019 to match the QE empirical window; (iii) hypotheses reframed as five stylised facts; (iv) new Online Appendix A documenting the AEI Classification Protocol with the verbatim system prompt and ten anchor examples; (v) §8 conclusion reinforces the framing of QE as a historical natural experiment and agentic AI as the systemic industrialisation of the same mechanism. Companion framework: ITEA Framework v3.0 (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.19578916).