Artificial intelligence, human rights, and the future of work: Global governance and international organizations in the age of AI

Artificial intelligence–driven automation is reshaping cognitive and service work, raising urgent questions for the protection of workers’ rights. Unlike earlier automation focused on routine tasks, contemporary AI reaches nonroutine, mid-skill occupations, directly engaging the rights to freely chosen work and to just and favorable conditions of work under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. This article proposes a rights-based governance architecture that binds AI deployment to worker voice, enforceable human rights due diligence under the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, and universal social-protection floors. It links foundational UN human rights doctrine to existing national, regional, and multilateral regimes and analyzes comparative approaches in the European Union, the United States, China, and the Global South. Particular attention is given to how the United Nations, the International Labour Organization, the World Trade Organization, and global trade-union federations can translate norms into enforceable safeguards. The article contributes a layered, implementable framework that turns abstract rights into operational protections, showing how technological transitions can be governed to secure dignity, equality, and security for workers. The primary threat is structural: AI-driven automation risks displacing entire categories of mid-skill work faster than complementary roles emerge, concentrating gains in capital and high-skill labor. Compounding this structural displacement are second-order harms—algorithmic discrimination, invasive monitoring, wage erosion, and precarity—that degrade job quality for workers who remain.