Fortifying the Algorithmic Management Provisions in the Proposed Platform Work Directive

The European Commission proposed a Directive on Platform Work at the end of 2021. While much attention has been placed on its effort to address misclassification of the employed as self-employed, it also contains ambitious provisions for the regulation of the algorithmic management prevalent on these platforms. Overall, these provisions are well-drafted, yet they require extra scrutiny in light of the fierce lobbying and resistance they will likely encounter in the legislative process, in implementation and in enforcement. In this article, we place the proposal in its sociotechnical context, drawing upon wide cross-disciplinary scholarship to identify a range of tensions, potential misinterpretations, and perversions that should be pre-empted and guarded against at the earliest possible stage. These include improvements to ex ante and ex post algorithmic transparency; identifying and strengthening the standard against which human reviewers of algorithmic decisions review; anticipating challenges of representation and organising in complex platform contexts; creating realistic ambitions for digital worker communication channels; and accountably monitoring and evaluating impacts on workers while limiting data collection. We encourage legislators and regulators at both European and national levels to act to fortify these provisions in the negotiation of the Directive, its potential transposition, and in its enforcement

Content marketplaces as digital labour platforms: towards accountable algorithmic management and decent work for content creators

YouTube is probably the world’s largest digital labour platform. YouTube creators report similar decent work deficits as other platform workers: economic and psychosocial impacts from opaque, error-prone algorithmic management; no collective bargaining; and possible employment misclassification. In December 2021, the European Commission announced a new proposal for a Directive ‘on improving working conditions in platform work’ (the ‘Platform Work Directive’). However, the definition of ‘platform work’ in the proposed Directive may exclude YouTube. Commercial laws, however, may apply. In the US state of California, for example, Civil Code §1749.7 (previously AB 1790 [2019]) governs the relationship between ‘marketplaces’ and ‘marketplace sellers.’ In the European Union, Regulation 2019/1150 (the ‘Platform-to-Business Regulation’) similarly provides protections to ‘business users of online intermediation services.’ While the protections provided by these ‘marketplace laws’ are less comprehensive than those provided by the proposed Platform Work Directive, they might address some of the decent work deficits experienced by workers on content marketplaces, especially those arising from opaque and error-prone algorithmic management practices. Yet they have gone relatively underexamined in policy discussions on improving working conditions in platform work. Additionally, to our knowledge they have not been used or referred to in any legal action or public dispute against YouTube or any other digital labour platform. This paper uses the case of YouTube to consider the regulatory situation of ‘content marketplaces,’ a category of labour platform defined in the literature on working conditions in platform work but underdiscussed in policy research and proposals on platform work regulation—at least compared to location-based, microtask, and freelance platforms. The paper makes four contributions. First, it summarizes the literature on YouTube creators’ working conditions and collective action efforts, highlighting that creators on YouTube and other content marketplaces face similar challenges to other platform workers. Second, it considers the definition of ‘digital labour platform’ in the proposed EU Platform Work Directive and notes that YouTube and other content marketplaces may be excluded, despite their relevance. Third, it compares the California and EU ‘marketplace laws’ to the proposed Platform Work Directive, concluding that the marketplace laws, while valuable, do not fully address the decent work deficits experienced by content marketplace creators. Fourth, it presents policy options for addressing these deficits from the perspective of international labour standards

Guest Editorial: regulating algorithmic management

This special issue of the European Labour Law Journal, edited by Jeremias Adams-Prassl, Halefom Abraha, Aislinn Kelly-Lyth, Sangh Rakshita and Michael ‘Six’ Silberman, explores the regulation of Algorithmic Management in the European Union and beyond. In our guest editorial, we set out the background to the project, introduce the reader to the key themes and highlights of the papers to follow, and acknowledge the support that the project has enjoyed

Regulating algorithmic management: A blueprint

The promise—and perils—of algorithmic management are increasingly recognised in the literature. How should regulators respond to the automation of the full range of traditional employer functions, from hiring workers through to firing them? This article identifies two key regulatory gaps—an exacerbation of privacy harms and information asymmetries, and a loss of human agency—and sets out a series of policy options designed to address these novel harms. Redlines (prohibitions), purpose limitations, and individual as well as collective information rights are designed to protect against harmfully invasive data practices; provisions for human involvement ‘in the loop’ (banning fully automated terminations), ‘after the loop’ (a right to meaningful review), ‘before the loop’ (information and consultation rights) and ‘above the loop’ (impact assessments) aim to restore human agency in the deployment and governance of algorithmic management systems

Tracking Affective Labour for Agility in the Quantified Workplace

Sensory and tracking technologies are being introduced into workplaces in ways Taylor and the Gilbreths could only have imagined. New work design experiments merge wellness with productivity to measure and modulate the affective and emotional labour of resilience that is necessary to survive the turbulence of the widespread incorporation of agile management systems, in which workers are expected to take symbolic direction from machines. The Quantified Workplace project was carried out by one company that fitted sensory algorithmic devices to workers’ computers and bodies, which, this article argues, identify workers’ so-called agility and reveal management practices that track affective and emotional labour, categorized in the project as stress, subjective productivity and wellbeing. Capital’s accelerated attempts to capture more areas of work and workers’ capacities facilitate the conversion of labour power into a source of value but also results in alienation and abstraction. Participants’ resistance to participation in the Quantified Workplace reveals tensions in the labour process when affect is measured in processes of corporate change