Pope: Employment consultants should be close to families, promote safety

By Isabella H. de Carvalho

In an address to Italian employment consultants on Thursday, December 18, Pope Leo XIV encouraged them to be close to those who need most help, such as families with children or employees who take care of elderly or sick relatives, and to continue promoting safety in the workplace.

He met with the Italian Order of Employment Consultants at the Vatican in light of the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the Association of Employment Consultants’ professional register.

In Italy, employment consultants offer companies advice and support in matters related to employment, hiring, labor laws, and social security.

Humans still central in world of artificial intelligence

Pope Leo highlighted the importance of safeguarding human dignity in the workplace.

“At the center of any work dynamic, there should be neither capital, nor market laws, nor profit, but rather the individual, the family, and their well-being, to which everything else is secondary,” he explained, citing words from his predecessors, Pope Francis and St. John Paul II.

The Pope insisted that employment consultants should help meet the needs of young families, parents with small children, or those who, despite their jobs, have to take care of elderly or sick relatives.

“These are needs that no truly civilized society can afford to forget or neglect, and you have the means to support those who struggle to meet them,” he continued. “Today, in a context where technology and artificial intelligence increasingly manage and condition our activities, it is urgent to ensure that companies are characterized first and foremost as human and fraternal communities.”

Far too many deaths in the workplace

Pope Leo also encouraged employment consultants to continue in their important work of promoting workplace safety in order to prevent accidents. Italian employment consultants are in charge of offering and running formation and training courses for employees on this topic.

“It is a service to their own lives,” he said, lamenting that today there are still too many accidents and deaths in the workplace.  

“What should always be places of life—where people spend much of their time every day and expend a large portion of their energy—frequently turn into places of death and desolation,” he continued.

He quoted Pope Francis, who in a speech in 2023 said that “safety at work is like the air we breathe: we realize its importance only when it is tragically lacking, and it is always too late!”

“Preventing is better than curing, and that is what your valuable training contributions aim to achieve,” Pope Leo added.

Mediate between employees and employers

Lastly, Pope Leo emphasized that employment consultants have an important mediation role in terms of facilitating relationships between management and employees.

He pointed out that employment consultants “manage legal and administrative aspects that are fundamental to the lives of workers and their families,” and so there could be two temptations.

“On the one hand, excessive bureaucratization of relationships, and on the other, distance and detachment from reality,” the Pope explained.

Quoting Pope Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, he added that “both are harmful because, in the long run, they make the company environment unliveable, preventing it from being, according to its truest vocation, a supportive synergy”.

Pope Leo thus invited the employment consultants to not do their work “weighed down by the employer’s perspective” but to pay close attention “to the people in front of you, especially those who are in difficulty and have fewer opportunities to express their needs and assert their interests.”

“This is a great act of justice and charity,” he said.