With increased automation and the looming threat (or promise) of artificial intelligence, speculative fiction is an essential medium for considering the future of work, employment, and labor rights. Two authors in particular, Japan’s Hiroko Oyamada and Puerto Rico’s Pabsi Livmar, have written texts that look at the material effects of roboticized labor and laborers. Oyamada’s novella 工場 (2013, translated into English in 2019 as The Factory) follows three workers roboticized by their jobs, as they are mentally and emotionally broken down by mindless repetition, corporate bureaucracy, and meaningless projects. Livmar’s short story “Tulipanes” (2016, “Tulips”) offers the opposite perspective, as two robots tasked with fruitlessly searching for signs of life in an ecologically destroyed Earth are infected with human emotions like love and fear. With a transnational perspective, this project analyzes these depictions of roboticized humans and humanized robots to better understand what speculative fiction can teach us about labor, production, and capital. More than just exploring the lines between human and machine, these texts also insert natural elements into the conversation that both reflect and contradict repressive labor conditions; in Livmar’s story, the titular tulips have outlived even cockroaches, while Oyamada’s novella features omnipresent moss and a cast of mysterious cryptids living off factory refuse. The worldbuilding in both The Factory and “Tulips” creates speculative labor ecologies that spotlight and challenge contemporary practices of corporate greenwashing, natural resource exploitation, contingent labor, and workplace surveillance. Comparing these two texts highlights the political potential of speculative labor fictions within and beyond national contexts.