AI in the Workplace

The Catholic theology of work in three claims

Before evaluating the technology, the framework. Catholic teaching on work rests on a substantial body of doctrine developed across 130 years of encyclicals from Rerum Novarum (1891) to Laborem Exercens (1981) to Caritas in Veritate (2009). The framework rests on three claims worth stating clearly.

Work participates in God's creative activity. In Catholic teaching, human work is not a neutral exchange of labor for wages. It is a participation in God's ongoing creative work in the world. Saint John Paul II made this central to Laborem Exercens, arguing that human beings, in working, share in the activity of the Creator. This claim sounds abstract but does substantial analytical work. If work is a participation in God's creative activity, then the conditions of work are a matter of theological seriousness, not merely a matter of contract. Employers who treat workers as inputs to production rather than as persons exercising a created vocation are, in the Catholic view, violating something more important than labor law.

The worker is prior to the work. Catholic teaching insists on what John Paul II called the principle of "the priority of labor over capital." This means that the dignity of the worker is prior to and shapes the meaning of the work, not the other way around. A job that treats the worker as a person who happens to be performing a task is qualitatively different from a job that treats the task as primary and the worker as the instrument through which it is performed. This distinction is the moral hinge on which the entire Catholic framework on work turns. AI systems that treat the worker as a process to be optimized are, in this framework, violating something fundamental about what the worker is.

The worker has rights that precede the contract. Catholic teaching holds that workers have rights that arise from their dignity as persons, not from the bargain they have struck with their employer. These include the right to just wages, to safe working conditions, to organize and bargain collectively, to participate in decisions affecting their work, and to be treated with the respect due to a person. These rights are not abolished by the worker's agreement to a contract, because the worker cannot contract away their own dignity. AI systems that erode any of these rights are problematic regardless of what the employment contract says, regardless of what the workers signed, and regardless of whether the workers had any meaningful choice in the matter.

These three claims produce the framework that follows. The Catholic question about AI in the workplace is not whether the technology is efficient, profitable, or even legal. It is whether the use of AI in this workplace, in this way, respects the dignity of the workers it is operating on.

AI in hiring: the screening problem

The most pervasive use of AI in employment is in recruitment. The vast majority of resumes submitted to large employers in 2026 are now screened, ranked, or scored by AI before a human reviews them. The systems take many forms. Some parse resumes for keywords. Some predict job performance from candidate profiles. Some analyze interview videos for tone, facial expressions, and word choice. Some integrate with social media data to assess "culture fit." The market is mature and the systems are deeply embedded in corporate HR practice.

The Catholic concerns here are several and converge with concerns the law has begun to address.

The disappearance of the person. A resume-screening AI does not encounter the candidate as a person. It encounters a data representation of the candidate optimized for the metrics the model was trained on. Whatever in the candidate's personhood does not show up in the data simply does not exist for the system. Catholic teaching's insistence that the worker is a person, prior to and irreducible to the work, sits uncomfortably with a process that begins by reducing the candidate to a vector of features.

The reproduction of historical discrimination. Hiring AI is typically trained on historical hiring data. Historical hiring data reflects historical hiring patterns, which in many industries reflect generations of discrimination by race, gender, age, and class. The AI learns the patterns. The patterns persist. Candidates who would have been excluded by a biased human are now excluded by an unbiased-looking algorithm, with the additional feature that the discrimination is harder to detect and contest. Antiqua et Nova warned about this directly. The EU AI Act mandates bias monitoring as part of high-risk system obligations from August 2026.

The opacity of the decision. A candidate rejected by a human hiring manager can sometimes ask for and receive feedback. A candidate rejected by an AI screening tool typically cannot. The EU AI Act from August 2026 requires that affected persons receive an explanation when high-risk AI affects them, but the practical reality is that "explanation" often means a generic statement that does not actually allow the candidate to know what happened. Catholic teaching, which has always insisted on the worker's dignity, sits uncomfortably with a process where the candidate cannot find out why they were not considered for work they applied for.

None of this means Catholic employers cannot use hiring AI. It means they should use it with a vigilance that the marketing copy does not invite. Specifically: human review of decisions, particularly negative decisions, before they are finalized. Audit of the system's outcomes for patterns of bias. Willingness to give candidates meaningful explanations when they ask. Refusal to use systems where the vendor cannot or will not allow these things.

AI monitoring of workers

If hiring is where AI affects workers most pervasively, monitoring is where it affects them most invasively.

The technologies vary. Some monitor productivity metrics: keystrokes, mouse movements, time on task, completion rates. Some use video and audio to analyze worker behavior during the workday. Some track location, with logistics workers and delivery drivers under particular surveillance pressure. Some claim to read worker emotion through facial analysis or voice. Some integrate all of these into a single dashboard that gives managers a real-time view of the workforce that no manager in human history has previously had.

The Catholic objection here is direct. Catholic teaching has always held that the worker is owed conditions of work that respect their dignity. Pervasive surveillance is not such a condition. The worker who knows that every keystroke is logged, every break is timed, every facial expression is being analyzed, is working under conditions that the Catholic framework has consistently named as incompatible with human flourishing. The framing has shifted across documents, from the early twentieth-century language of just conditions to the contemporary language of dignity and autonomy, but the substance has been continuous.

The EU AI Act draws bright lines here that closely track the Catholic framework. Emotion recognition in the workplace is prohibited outside narrow exceptions, primarily medical and safety contexts. AI used to monitor or evaluate workers is treated as high-risk, with the full suite of obligations attached. The Act explicitly recognizes that workplace monitoring creates a structural power imbalance that requires legal correction.

Catholic teaching goes further than the law in one important respect. The law tells employers what they must not do. Catholic teaching asks employers to consider what they should do, which is a different question. An employer can be perfectly compliant with the AI Act and still be running a workplace that Catholic teaching would name as failing the workers in it. The framework here is not "what does the law require?" but "what is owed to the workers in light of their dignity as persons?" That second question almost always produces a more demanding answer than the first.

AI and the pace of work

A category of AI deployment that receives less policy attention than it deserves is the use of AI to set the pace of work. Warehouses, fulfillment centers, restaurants, retail stores, and an expanding range of other workplaces now use AI systems to determine how fast workers should be working. The systems set targets, measure performance against targets, and trigger interventions when workers fall behind. The targets are often calibrated to the top performers in the workplace, which means most workers are by design failing to meet them.

The Catholic framework here is unusually direct. The pace of work is, in the Catholic tradition, a matter of justice. Rerum Novarum in 1891 addressed the pace of work in the industrial era directly, condemning conditions under which "the hours of labour, the time allowed for rest, and the supply of work, particularly when of an exhausting kind, ought not to be too long, otherwise both health and capacity sink under the strain." The encyclical was written in response to industrial conditions that produced exactly the kind of strain on workers that contemporary AI-driven pace systems are reintroducing in a more sophisticated form.

The justice claim is twofold. First, workers are not machines, and their work cannot be optimized against engineering metrics without violence to their personhood. Second, the conditions of work shape the worker over time in ways that endure beyond the workday. A worker subjected to relentless algorithmic pace pressure for years carries the costs of that pressure into their family life, their health, and their capacity for community. The employer who imposes the pressure carries responsibility for those costs, even when the pressure is being delivered by an AI system the employer has merely deployed.

Pope Leo XIV chose his papal name in conscious continuity with Leo XIII, the pope who wrote Rerum Novarum. The choice signals that the Catholic engagement with AI-era labor is meant to be the contemporary counterpart to the Catholic engagement with industrial-era labor. The pace-of-work question is exactly the kind of question where that continuity will be operative.

Catholic employers and the responsibility they carry

A section of this page has to address Catholic employers directly, because Catholic institutions are not bystanders in the use of workplace AI.

Catholic schools, universities, hospitals, charities, dioceses, religious orders, and Catholic-owned businesses all now use, or are considering, AI tools for hiring, performance management, scheduling, and worker monitoring. The market is offering these tools to Catholic institutions on the same terms as to anyone else. The question is whether Catholic institutions should accept them on those terms.

Catholic teaching insists that institutions which identify as Catholic carry an obligation to conduct their affairs in conformity with Catholic teaching, including their employment practices. The bishops of the United States, in their pastoral letter Economic Justice for All, argued that Catholic institutions should be exemplary employers, not merely legally compliant ones. The same standard applies to the AI tools those institutions deploy.

Concretely, a Catholic institution evaluating workplace AI should ask: Does this tool treat our workers as the dignity-bearing persons our institutional identity insists they are? Are there meaningful human checks on the tool's decisions? Will workers know the tool is being used against them, understand how it works, and have access to appeal? Are we monitoring the tool's outcomes for patterns we would not accept from a human supervisor? Have we asked our workers what they think about the deployment?

These questions are not legal requirements. They are the questions a Catholic employer should ask in order to operate consistently with Catholic teaching. Catholic institutions that cannot answer them satisfactorily are running their workplaces in ways that fall short of what their identity professes.

What Catholic workers can actually do

This page closes with practical guidance for Catholic readers who are themselves workers, because the framework is most useful when it produces action.

Know your legal rights. In the EU, workers and their representatives have substantial rights under the AI Act, including the right to be informed before high-risk AI systems are deployed, the right to receive an explanation of significant AI-driven decisions, and the right to a human review. In the United States, protections are emerging at the state level and through federal agencies. Catholic workers should know what their jurisdiction provides and should not assume that the employer will volunteer this information.

Organize. Catholic teaching from Rerum Novarum forward has affirmed the right of workers to organize and to bargain collectively. AI in the workplace makes organization more necessary, not less. The structural power imbalance between an individual worker and an algorithmic management system is too great for individual workers to address. Collective action, through unions where they exist or through other worker associations, is the response the Catholic tradition has consistently endorsed.

Refuse the framing that algorithms are neutral. One of the most common ways AI in the workplace is normalized is the framing that the algorithm is just a tool, that the patterns it produces are facts about the world, that the discipline it imposes is objective. None of this is true. The algorithm reflects choices made by the people who built and deployed it. Workers who refuse the framing of algorithmic neutrality are doing the basic intellectual work that allows accountability to function.

Support fellow workers harmed by AI systems. Catholic solidarity requires that workers stand with one another, particularly with those harmed by structures the workers themselves did not choose. A colleague unfairly scored by a hiring AI, fired by an opaque performance system, or driven to exhaustion by a pace algorithm deserves the solidarity of the workers around them. This is the most basic application of the Catholic principle that the worker's dignity is not their individual property but the shared concern of the community.

Bring concerns to civil and ecclesial leaders. Catholic workers harmed by workplace AI have access to channels their non-Catholic colleagues may not. Catholic legislators, Catholic civil-society organizations, Catholic worker associations, and pastoral leaders can amplify concerns in ways that pure individual action cannot. The bishops of the United States have a long tradition of pastoral engagement with labor questions. AI in the workplace is exactly the kind of issue that warrants pastoral attention.

The first papal encyclical addressed the industrial worker. The encyclical releasing on May 25, 2026, is being written in continuity with that founding document, with the AI-era worker as one of its central concerns. The framework Catholic teaching has been building for 135 years is exactly what this moment needs. The question is whether Catholic readers will use it.