Disarming Digital Power to Protect Workers

In his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity), Pope Leo XIV presents a groundbreaking framework on the protection of the human person in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Warning against a rising “throw-away culture” of digital exclusion, the Holy Father cautions that the breakneck pace of AI advancement is outpacing ethical safeguards, leaving the world vulnerable to technical domination.

Responding to this urgent global teaching, the four branches of the Maryknoll family, which includes the Maryknoll Sisters, Fathers and Brothers, Lay Missioners, and Affiliates, released a joint leadership statement on May 27, echoing the Holy Father’s prophetic message. Drawing from decades of lived experience crossing borders, Maryknoll missioners witness firsthand how profit-driven digital tech exploits marginalized communities, giving rise to what they term a new era of “digital colonialism.”

A primary focal point of the encyclical, amplified heavily by Maryknoll leadership, is the plight of the invisible global workforce that fuels the AI industry. Maryknoll points to two specific nations where their missioners serve, and outsourcing dominates digital labor: Kenya and the Philippines.

In Kenya, highly qualified, university-educated youth are absorbed into precarious, hyper-exploitative “grunt work.” Nairobi is a primary hub for data annotation, where, according to a study by the International Labor Organization (ILO), digital workers often earn as little as 89 cents an hour to manually label images, text, and video; train complex algorithms; and sift through traumatic content so that machine learning algorithms know what they are seeing.

These young adults spend long shifts exposed to graphic violence, animal abuse, and explicit material to ensure AI models are “safe” for Western consumers, yet receive minimal mental health support and no job security. Workers are routinely required to review thousands of deeply disturbing text prompts and graphic depictions daily, inducing severe psychological trauma akin to post-traumatic stress disorder. Despite this heavy toll, they are often denied therapeutic interventions, adequate breaks, or stable contracts, facing sudden termination if their speed or accuracy metrics slip.

Fed up with these abysmal conditions, tech laborers recently organized Africa’s first content moderators’ union, called the Data Labelers Association, to fight for legal protections and mental health accountability. This digital piecework explicitly exploits local economic desperation, turning systemic under-employment into a pipeline of cheap data labor for foreign tech giants who distance themselves from the human cost of their supply chains.

In the Philippines, the potential for massive job loss by AI technology is an immediate threat to hard-won economic stability. Between four and five million people are currently employed in the nation’s massive digital call center and business process outsourcing (BPO) sectors, which serve as a critical economic pillar, contributing nearly ten percent of the country’s GDP. Today, these workers face looming job displacement as generative AI rapidly automates routine customer service, transcription, and basic technical support roles. Sophisticated AI-powered chatbots and large language models are now capable of handling complex client interactions with minimal latency, threatening to make entry-level support roles entirely obsolete.

For a workforce that has historically relied on steady salaries and night-shift differentials to fund housing, healthcare, and education for extended families, this aggressive technological shift is devastating. Even as the government commits tens of millions of dollars annually to emergency reskilling programs, the scale of automation threatens to outpace these defensive safety nets. This extraction of cheap human labor and subsequent abandonment when automation becomes cheaper reinforces an unjust world order where the Global North reaps massive profits while the Global South bears the burdens of economic disruption.

Ultimately, Pope Leo XIV does not demonize technology itself, but calls for its urgent regulation and disarmament. He rejects the idea that algorithms are morally neutral, insisting that society must evaluate how these systems are built and whose interests they serve.

A major milestone in this struggle for worker rights occurred on June 12 when the ILO formally adopted Convention No. 193 concerning Decent Work in the Platform Economy. As the first global treaty to establish binding labor standards for gig economy and digital platform workers across 187 member countries, it establishes mandatory protections for pay, algorithmic management, occupational health, and safety.

For AI labelers and digital workers in Kenya and the Philippines, this new ILO treaty extends legally binding rights, algorithmic transparency, and mental health protections, forcing foreign tech platforms to be legally accountable under local labor laws if ratified. It represents a vital step forward in answering the call to protect the inherent dignity of human labor against tech-driven exploitation.

Photo: Call center in Cainta, Philippines, courtesy of Maverx, available in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons.