A proposal on how to involve workers in implementing AI

It goes into serious details on “how to”… pity it is so utterly unrealistic

One of the most valuable things about the recent Commonplace essay on AI and labor is that it refuses to hide behind slogans. Its authors offer an actual plan: workers should be consulted before AI systems affecting wages, hours, and working conditions are deployed; unions or elected worker representatives should have a real role; workers should have the right to challenge AI-driven decisions before a human being; sectors should collaborate to forecast disruption; and displaced workers should have retraining, benefits, and income support. In a debate too often dominated by abstractions, that seriousness deserves respect.

And yet the proposal is also, in its current form, deeply unrealistic.

It presupposes a labor order that largely does not exist. It assumes a thicker web of labor law, a stronger culture of good-faith corporate responsibility, and a denser network of mediating institutions than America actually possesses. It imagines large employers willing to slow down, disclose, consult, revise, and wait while AI implementation is happening at breakneck speed, under enormous competitive and financial pressure. That is not impossible in theory. It is just very far from the reality we actually inhabit.

This is the hard truth the AI debate often avoids. The labor crisis created by AI is real, and massive firings are among its most immediate and visible expressions. But the speed of this technological transition is colliding with a legal and institutional framework too thin, too fragmented, and too weak to manage it well. One cannot simply summon a humane social compact into existence by writing down what it ought to look like.

Still, that is not a reason to dismiss the essay. On the contrary, its very unrealism reveals its value.

What it offers is a blueprint. And in this moment, blueprints matter. If we are serious about protecting human beings during the AI revolution, then generic declarations about “human dignity,” however true, are not enough. Principles must become procedures; meaning that sympathy for workers must become concrete proposals about notice, review, participation, retraining, and support.

From a Catholic perspective, this matters a great deal. The Church’s social teaching has never been content with pious sentiments detached from social form. Catholic realism demands that we see the world as it is: power is unevenly distributed, markets move faster than moral reflection, and institutions are often too weak to defend the vulnerable. But Catholic realism also refuses despair. It asks what concrete structures might embody justice, solidarity, subsidiarity, and the dignity of work under actual historical conditions.

That is why the Commonplace proposal should be read in two ways at once. First, as an inadequate answer to the present American situation: too dependent on legal protections and corporate goodwill that are mostly absent, and too slow for the pace of AI adoption. Second, as a necessary provocation: a reminder that if we want to defend workers, we must do more than lament. We must build.

That is the deeper lesson here. AI is forcing the labor question back onto the table. And if Catholics want to contribute meaningfully to that debate, we will need more than declarations. We will need imagination disciplined by reality, and principles tough enough to become policy.