The Work That Ships Nothing

Last Wednesday, Uber cut about 3,300 jobs, and its memo said which ones: the roles “primarily focused on coordination.” The company’s own employees had told it they spent too much of the day getting other teams to agree and too little building. So here is the question for a Catholic reader. When a company deletes the jobs whose whole value was holding other people’s work together, does the Church’s teaching on work defend those jobs, or judge them?

The Principle

The Church has one distinction that governs every conversation about automation, and the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church states it in a single paragraph. “Human work has a twofold significance: objective and subjective. In the objective sense, it is the sum of activities, resources, instruments and technologies used by men and women to produce things.” In the subjective sense, “work is the activity of the human person as a dynamic being capable of performing a variety of actions that are part of the work process and that correspond to his personal vocation.” Then the sentence that matters. Objective work “constantly varies in its expressions according to the changing technological, cultural, social and political conditions,” while subjective work “represents its stable dimension, since it does not depend on what people produce or on the type of activity they undertake, but only and exclusively on their dignity as human beings.”¹

Hold those two apart, and you can follow almost any argument about AI and jobs without getting lost. The objective side is what got produced. The subjective side is who the person became by producing it. Tools, org charts, and job descriptions all live on the objective side, which is why the Church has never canonized any of them. The person lives on the subjective side, and the Church ranks that side first. The Compendium says so without hedging: “The subjective dimension of work must take precedence over the objective dimension.” Where that order is reversed, “work activity and the very technology employed become more important than the person himself and at the same time are transformed into enemies of his dignity.”²

That ranking has a lineage, and a reader who sees three popes running one argument stops hearing it as a mood. John Paul II wrote in 1981 that “the sources of the dignity of work are to be sought primarily in the subjective dimension, not in the objective one,” and that “in the first place work is ‘for man’ and not man ‘for work’.”³ The Compendium quotes him in 2004. Leo XIV builds on both in May of this year. Work, he writes, is “a fundamental good for the person, a principle of economic activity and the key to the entire societal question,” and through it “human beings bring their freedom, creativity and capacity for cooperation into play.” So “job insecurity, fragmented career paths and automation must not be evaluated solely in terms of efficiency, but in relation to the dignity of the worker, the right to sufficient remuneration and the genuine possibility of participating in society.”⁴

Look at what Leo XIV put inside the definition. Cooperation, besides freedom and creativity, is one of the things work draws out of a person. He returns to it in the chapter on work, where we “engage in cooperative relationships and, through listening and dialogue, learn to build together something that no one could achieve alone.”⁵ The Compendium had already said the same in its own register: “more than ever, work is work with others and work for others,” and work “cannot be properly evaluated if its social nature is not taken into account.”⁶

That is why this issue’s principle uses the word participation. The Compendium defines participation as the citizen contributing, alone or with others, “to the cultural, economic, political and social life of the civil community to which he belongs,” and then refuses to leave it in the voting booth. It “cannot be confined or restricted to only a certain area of social life,” and it names where else it belongs: “the world of work and economic activity, especially in their internal dynamics.”⁷ Internal dynamics. That is org-chart language, written in 2004. Participation is owed inside the company, in how the work is arranged, and a person whose job is to make other people’s work fit together is taking part in exactly the sense the Compendium means.

Aquinas supplies the reason underneath. God “governs things inferior by superior, not on account of any defect in His power, but by reason of the abundance of His goodness; so that the dignity of causality is imparted even to creatures.”⁸ Real ownership of one’s work is a share in that dignity. Keep the sentence in reach, because it cuts both ways later.

Now the levels of authority. That the subjective dimension takes precedence over the objective is ordinary magisterium, taught consistently for 45 years across three pontificates. That every introduction of automation should carry “verifiable measures” for workers is a path Leo XIV proposes, and he says in the same breath that “no single model of change or universal solution exists.”⁹ Whether a particular reorganization passes that test is prudential. Faithful Catholics can disagree about Uber. They cannot rank the output above the person.

The Case

On September 2, 2026, Uber cut about 3,300 jobs, roughly 10 percent of its global headcount and its largest reduction since the pandemic, and published the internal memo the same day. The memo is unusually specific about what went. Uber “reduced roles primarily focused on coordination,” cut the number of employees sitting seven or more layers from the CEO by 20 percent, and cut “micro-teams” of one or two reports by nearly half. Delivery operations were merged into single-threaded teams. The stated warrant was the employees themselves: internal surveys had said “too much work requires coordination across teams, debates take too long, and decision-making rights are unclear,” and that people spent “too much time ‘aligning’ rather than building, shipping, or serving customers.” The goal is “a simpler org chart geared toward building versus managing.” Savings will be reinvested, including in “the autonomous future.” The same memo ends most remote work and requires three days a week in an office. All of this while revenue grew 12 percent in the second quarter, to $14.2 billion, and two months after Bloomberg reported a cut of about 10 percent of customer service roles that cited AI directly.¹⁰

Now run the principle over it, and be honest about where it bites. A coordinator ships nothing. On a purely objective account of work, that settles the matter, and the job goes. On the Church’s account, it settles nothing, because Magnifica Humanitas 148 names “listening and dialogue” and learning “to build together something that no one could achieve alone” as things work is for, and Compendium 273 says work cannot be evaluated apart from its social nature. Coordination is work.

But the principle hands Uber’s old org chart no defense either. The Compendium condemns treating a worker as “an impersonal element of the apparatus for productivity,” which judges how persons are treated and says nothing in favor of a seventh layer of management. Employees’ own testimony counts. Leo XIV warns that new ways of working frequently force “workers to adapt to the speed and demands of machines, rather than machines being designed to support those who work.”¹¹ People who report that their days had become one long effort to get other teams to agree are describing that. The Catholic question is why participatory work had turned into friction, and that question survives the layoff.

So the judgment moves from how many jobs to on what terms. Here Leo XIV gives a layperson a test. “It is not enough to react only when jobs disappear; we must oversee the transformation in advance,” and “every introduction of automation and AI should be accompanied by verifiable measures to protect the employment, retraining and participation of workers.”¹² Verifiable. Read the memo with that word in hand. It commits the savings to growth and to autonomy. It commits nothing verifiable to retraining or transition for the 3,300. That is no accusation of bad faith; it is the question the encyclical tells you to ask, asked out loud. And give the memo its due where it earns it: ordering managers back into the same room as their teams favors the social dimension of work, and Compendium 273 is on Uber’s side of that one.

What To Say

1. Start with the distinction, because it does most of the work. Objective: what got made. Subjective: who the person became by making it. The Church says the second one is the stable one. It doesn’t depend on what you produce.
2. Coordination is work. Someone whose job is to make other people’s work fit together is taking part, and the Pope put “capacity for cooperation” inside his definition of what work draws out of a person. Say that plainly when someone calls a whole layer of people overhead.
3. Then concede, and mean it. A Catholic can favor a flatter company. Nothing in the social doctrine defends bloat. The Church objects to efficiency used as the only measure, and she says so in those words.
4. Ask the memo test. When a restructuring is announced, look for verifiable commitments to retraining and transition sitting beside the reinvestment line. The encyclical uses that exact word, and it takes 30 seconds to check a press release.
5. Keep the claim the size it actually is. Leo XIV says transitions are uneven and no universal model exists, and he predicts no mass permanent unemployment. Quote the concession and the claim together, or somebody who knows labor economics will correct you in front of everyone.
6. Take the workers’ own complaint seriously without letting it be the whole verdict. People said the coordinating was miserable. That’s real. It still leaves open whether the roles were worth keeping, or whether the company had made participation miserable and then deleted it.

The Objection

Its best advocate lays out the argument like this. Every generation has predicted that machines would end work, and every generation has been wrong for a reason we understand: automation replaces some tasks and complements others, and the complemented tasks are usually the human ones. When cash machines spread through American banking, tellers per branch fell, branches became cheap enough to multiply, and the total number of tellers rose while the job itself shifted from counting cash to talking to customers about loans. Uber’s memo describes the same pattern. It kept the people who serve riders and build products and cut roles “primarily focused on coordination,” because its own employees said in its own surveys that they spent their days “aligning” instead of building. A management layer whose function is to broker meetings between other management layers is a tax the workers reported paying. Removing it hands them back ownership of what they do, which is what participation is supposed to mean. If the Church wants work to be real human contribution, flattening seven layers is on her side of the argument. And the same memo put managers back in the room with their teams, the most pro-relationship decision a large employer has made in years.

Three answers, and the first has to be a real concession or the other two will not land.

First, grant the economics, because the Church grants them. Magnifica Humanitas 153 says transitions are “uneven, fragmented and sometimes conflictual” and that “no single model of change or universal solution exists.”¹³ A Catholic can favor flattening a hierarchy, and Aquinas’s dignity of causality argues for it wherever a layer holds authority it never exercises.

Second, the teller outcome took an expanding industry about two decades to produce, and it owed nothing to anyone. Leo XIV turns that historical accident into an obligation with the word “verifiable.” The objection assumes the good outcome will arrive. The Church asks who is answerable for producing it, and by what test, and adds that unions, cooperatives, and labor law, the instruments that made the last transitions survivable, “are no longer sufficient by themselves” at this speed.¹⁴

Third, and this is where the disagreement actually lives. The claim that the subjective dimension takes precedence over the objective is a claim about what a person is. No data set will produce it. Someone who holds that the value of work just is the value of what it produces will be unmoved by Compendium 271, and telling him he has misread the evidence would be dishonest, because he has not. That is where the two positions part.

This Week

Read Magnifica Humanitas 148 through 156. Nine sections, about fifteen minutes, and 156 gives you the one word to carry into every restructuring announcement for the rest of the year. Then find one such announcement, from your own employer or anyone else’s, and run the memo test: does it commit anything verifiable to the people it displaces? Write down the answer. And pray this week for the 3,300, and for the managers who signed the memo and must answer for a transition the Church says must be overseen in advance.

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Notes

1. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 270, https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/justpeace/documents/rc_pc_justpeace_doc_20060526_compendio-dott-soc_en.html. ↩
2. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 271. ↩
3. John Paul II, Laborem Exercens (encyclical letter, September 14, 1981), no. 6, https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_14091981_laborem-exercens.html. ↩
4. Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (encyclical letter, May 15, 2026), no. 37, https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html. ↩
5. Ibid., no. 148. ↩
6. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 273. ↩
7. Ibid., no. 189. ↩
8. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 22, a. 3, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (1920), https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1022.htm. ↩
9. Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, nos. 156 and 153. ↩
10. Uber, “A Simpler, Faster Uber,” internal memo published September 2, 2026, https://www.uber.com/us/en/newsroom/simplerfasteruber/; TechCrunch, “Uber is laying off 10% of staff, or 3,300 people,” September 2, 2026, https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/02/uber-is-laying-off-10-of-staff-or-3300-people/; CNBC, “Uber to cut 10% of workforce in bid to move ‘simpler and faster,'” September 2, 2026, https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/02/uber-to-cut-10percent-of-workforce-in-bid-to-move-simpler-and-faster.html; Bloomberg, “Uber to Cut 3,300 Jobs in Company Overhaul to Reduce Management Layers,” September 2, 2026. ↩
11. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 271; Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 150. ↩
12. Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 156. ↩
13. Ibid., no. 153. ↩
14. Ibid., nos. 156 and 155. ↩