Liz Shuler, the president of the AFL-CIO, described the significance of Pope Leo’s encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” as “huge, absolutely huge,” in this exclusive interview with America. “When I first read it,” she said, “I just felt like this could have been a document written by the trade union movement.” She said she was also impressed by “the convening power of the church” and considered this very important in our day.

Ms. Shuler is the first woman president of the AFL-CIO, and she represented the American labor unions at the fourth synodal encounter, “Fratelli Tutti: North-South socio-environmental dialogue,” which was held in the Vatican Sept. 11-13. 

Speaking at a Vatican press conference on Sept. 11, the day before she met Pope Leo, she explained that as AFL-CIO president she was representing not only its 15 million workers but also the Trade Union Confederation of the Americas, which represents unions from throughout the Americas with more that 55 million workers, and the International Trade Union Confederation, which represents 191 million workers across 169 countries. 

“We are here today,” she said, “because like the church and Pope Leo we believe deeply in social dialogue and see it as an essential element to advancing the common good.” She recalled that in “Magnifica Humanitas” the pope said, “We must make listening and dialogue the common ground upon which to cultivate justice,” and Ms. Shuler added, “our labor unions are deeply aligned with that vision.” 

At the Vatican encounter, she said, “we have benefited exactly from this kind of dialogue. We’ve looked at opportunities to build partnerships with the church, businesses and other stakeholders. And when it comes to the massive challenges of A.I. and this moment of economic transformation, we discussed how the recent encyclical reflects many of our priorities to ensure A.I. is centered around the needs of workers and all of humanity.” 

Drawing attention to the fact that “we have CEOs who want to play God to make decisions that affect hundreds of millions of working people without our input or consent,” the AFL-CIO president said, “We are here today because we can choose a better path with workers at the table, engaging in dialogue with other stakeholders to shape a more hopeful and just future.”

She recalled that 135 years ago, during the Second Industrial Revolution, Pope Leo wrote in “Rerum Novarum” about labor and capital “at a time when electricity was a new technology that was raw, revolutionary and dangerous, and companies were racing to make profits, and people were suffering.” At the time, she said, “It was the workers organizing together who stood up to demand safety from the government, from power companies, and negotiated to make sure electricity was installed and used responsibly to benefit everyone.” 

“Today too,” she said, “we need the same kinds of social dialogue, unconventional partnerships to protect working people and build a better future for all of us.” 

She reported that three years ago the AFL-CIO reached just that kind of agreement with Microsoft (also present at the Vatican meeting): “A first of its kind partnership that guarantees workers a voice in the development of A.I. and in the decisions that will affect their lives and their future.” 

She concluded by saying she was “encouraged by our talks over these past days with a focus on social dialogue to solve these challenges.” She added, “I’m deeply grateful to the church, and to Pope Leo for his leadership and convening us here, and our unions stand ready to work with any business, any faith, or community leader anywhere that is interested in advancing a future that benefits us all.” 

I spoke with Ms. Shuler after the press conference and since, in her presentation, she had highlighted the importance of social dialogue, I asked: How difficult is it to have such a dialogue in the United States at this present moment? 

Extremely difficult, because we don’t have the institution of social dialogue like many other countries do. We have collective bargaining. Collective bargaining is our form of social dialogue where labor sits across the table from an employer and negotiates the conditions of work. But the institution [of social dialogue] doesn’t exist like it does in places like Europe where you have multiple stakeholders around a table proactively discussing big challenges and finding solutions by listening to each other and learning and exploring and strategizing. My hope is that going forward we can institute more systems of social dialogue in the United States because we need them desperately. 

What contribution could the Catholic Church in the United States make to developing this possibility of social dialogue? 

I think using the platform of their voice and their influence to uplift the need and the importance of what they’ve seen in other countries and how it works. Because I think it’s really more a foreign concept. It’s not something that’s been in our tradition. I think we grow up in the U.S. thinking of labor and management as adversaries. But in my experience, we can be great partners. We can be solutions driven. We are the workers on the front lines of the workplace that see when things go wrong, or what can be improved, and I think can be a great asset to companies if we’re viewed that way and treated as such. 

You spoke about the agreement you reached with Microsoft three years ago about A.I. and the new technologies. Could you summarize that for us?

Essentially, it’s three parts. One is worker voice and the development of technology where you get workers involved in the process with the developers of these software and technologies. Get them in the labs. If we’re going to be instituting a program, or use A.I. in city government, you have a bus driver in the lab working with the technologists to give worker insights and protections. That’s the first pillar. 

The second piece is around policy. We’ve started with things like training and workforce development, but we’re also talking about guardrails. [In this context] there’s the landmark agreement regarding the schools because that was the first of its kind, blossoming out of this partnership; you would normally not have teachers working with a tech company about how to use data in the classroom.

The third piece is our neutrality agreement. Neutrality in the U.S. means companies do not fight you when you try to unionize. We have a neutrality agreement as part of this partnership, and workers at Microsoft are organizing unions. That’s rare in the United States. Mostly, employers will be oppositional, and they’ll try to discourage workers and break the law, frankly, to do it.

We have already three or four different units within Microsoft that have organized, and we just got the first contract with Activision Blizzard, a video game company, ratified. I think it was two days ago. It’s a successful example.

You’ve participated in this meeting at the Vatican. What have you learned from it? 

Well, the power of the convening is just very omnipresent because obviously the encyclicals, the most recent one, “Magnifica Humanitas,” is to me the most powerful signal that you can send because who has more authority to speak on the dignity of people and making sure that we are creating systems around the world that put people at the center. And if we’re taking on big challenges, we have to have people at the table who are often voiceless.

And so to me, it is incredibly impressive to see the power that the church has to convene. I mean, you would normally not have people in a room like we have without the personal intervention of leaders in the church saying, ‘We need you here.’ So I think that was pretty powerful.

Also, just being able to dissect the encyclical to each session we have had has been centered around an element of the encyclical. And so that’s to me what I take back is the parallels of everything we’re fighting for on a daily basis is aligned almost exactly with the encyclical. And so this partnership between labor and faith, but also now bringing in business, banks, voices that normally we would not be sitting at tables with.

Do you see that because of Pope Leo, the Catholic Church is reaching more into the heart of the U.S. business world, and its work world? 

I’m not quite sure because I don’t know. I mean, there’s not that much of a departure in terms of philosophy from Francis. So it’s maybe in relational aspects. I’m not sure exactly. 

But I do know that we’re very excited in the United States to have an American pope. And our Chicago labor movement is here, too, with me and has deep ties and deep relationships [with the church]. And to see the American influence on the kind of approaches that are being taken now is very heartening.

Now this meeting brings together North and South America. Canada is here, and obviously this is significant.

How is it significant? Do you see this as a kind of a breakthrough? How do you read this? 

I think it’s providing hope. I will say in the U.S. there’s kind of a lack of hope in terms of working people being seen. The economy is not working for them. The rules are broken.

They feel somewhat powerless. But we’re not here to talk about politics. It’s really about showing that there’s a hopeful path forward.

And to have Canada sitting at the table with us, where we know we’ve got tension between our countries over trade policy, to me shows the power of this setting is that we can put those differences aside, or not focus on the polarization that’s going on politically and instead focus on solutions and how the church can actually be providing that hopeful path forward. 

Pope Francis said we shouldn’t look to the leaders for change, we should look to the grassroots. [“The future of humanity does not lie solely in the hands of the great leaders, the great powers, and the elites. It is fundamentally in the hands of people and in their capacity to organize,” Santa Cruz, Bolivia, 2015.]

I couldn’t agree more. And that was discussed yesterday, actually, because it’s not about one person. It’s not about one leader. It’s about all of us in our own capacities being leaders. I hate to say from the bottom up because that doesn’t sound right either, but rather it’s from the grassroots, the local empowerment, the local capacity and the networks we build and the interfacing that takes place at a community level with the church, with unions, with NGOs and community organizations and hopefully local business. As you said you take back certain things from it.

Is there anything that you found very surprising in the meeting? 

Well, I haven’t quite digested everything, I think there is a real awakening around the role of trade unions. It’s always been there. But I think for us, it’s sort of reigniting and elevating something that already existed to a higher priority. And so I’m leaving with that. Just, you know, the deep respect that we have for each other, listening [to each other] to see [if there’s a way forward].

I brought my Microsoft counterpart with me and to have him sitting in the room listening all day, you know, not looking at his phone—I mean, that to me says a lot because there’s so many distractions and so many competing priorities. But this is a real priority.

Then, of course, there is this whole question of protecting the human person in the age of artificial intelligence. How do you read it?

That really is central. We’re the labor movement and we believe this [movement] is the place to chart a path forward for working people in this technological revolution because people are nervous. They’re scared about what their future is going to look like and how it’s going to impact their jobs and their ability to feed their families.

And rightly so, because right now it’s untested and unregulated. And so we’re fighting on every front to have a seat at the table, but to also make sure that we get the guardrails in place to protect our privacy, to protect our data, to protect us from, you know, surveillance and harms in the workplace that we know are coming. And so we think the labor movement is uniquely positioned and that workers should be leading on the front edge of this change.

How do you see the significance of Pope Leo’s encyclical, ‘Magnifica Humanitas’? 

Oh, it’s huge! It’s absolutely huge. And when I first read it, you know, I just felt like this could have been a document written by the trade union movement because it was so in alignment with the many thought pieces that we’ve put out and the convenings we’ve had. But it takes it to a global scale. And I don’t think the rest of the world is paying attention as closely. And so his voice was extremely powerful in that way because it really centers humanity. And that doesn’t get talked about enough. 

Gerard O’Connell is America’s senior Vatican correspondent and author of The Election of Pope Francis: An Inside Story of the Conclave That Changed History. He has been covering the Vatican since 1985.