#algorithmic-management — Public Fediverse posts

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Our director Jessica Pidoux will be speaking on Friday, 8 May 2026 at the @towardsfairwork workshop ‘Beyond Transparency: Algorithmic Management and Socio-Technical Accountability in Platform Work’

This one-day expert workshop brings together researchers, unions, NGOs, platform representatives, and policy/practice actors to examine how algorithmic management shapes working conditions and representation in the German platform economy.

🔗 https://www.fairwork-am-workshop-xu.online/

#personaldata #algorithmicmanagement #workshop

"Wray proposes a detailed series of recommendations to unions for things they should demand in their contracts to maximize their chances to capitalize on the opportunities afforded by the Platform Work Directive, such as establishing a "governance body" within the company "to govern data formation, storage, handling and security issues. This body should include shop stewards and all members of the body should receive data training."

He also sets out technological tactics that unions can fund and capitalize on to maximize their use of the directive, such as hacking apps to allow gig workers to increase their earnings. He writes warmly of "the sock-puppet method," where many test accounts are used to place and book work through platforms to monitor their pricing systems to detect collusion and price rigging. This has been successfully used in Spain to create the basis for an ongoing lawsuit over price collusion.

The new world of algorithmic management and the new Platform Work Directive offers many opportunities to organized labor. However, there is always the possibility that an employer will simply refuse to follow the law – as Uber has done, after it was found guilty of violating data disclosure work and was fined €6,000/day until it came into compliance. Uber's now paid €500,000 in fines and has not disclosed the data that the law and the courts require of it.

With algorithmic management, bosses have figured out new ways to evade the law and steal from workers. The Platform Work Directive gives workers and unions a whole suite of new tools to force bosses to play fair. It's not going to be easy, but the technological capacity workers and unions develop here can be repurposed to wage all-out digital class warfare."

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/25/roboboss/#counterapps

#EU #PWD #PlatformWorkDirective #AlgorithmicManagement #Roboboss #GigEconomy #Precarity

What do platforms really do? 

In 1986, David S. Landes wrote the essay, ‘What Do Bosses Really Do?’. He argues that the historical role of the ‘boss’ was an essential function for organizing production and connecting producers to markets. Digital platforms have become the new bosses. Platforms have the same functions of market creation, labor specialization, and management, but they have replaced the physical factory floor with algorithmic management. While their methods are novel, platforms are the direct descendants of the merchant-entrepreneurs and factory owners Landes described, solving the same historical problems of production in remarkably similar ways.

So, why am I posting this on my own blog and not on a “platform”? I don’t view writing as a financial transaction. It is a hobby. By putting the financialization lens front and center, platforms are killing the mental space for hobbies. When you monetize tweets, you create incentive to craft tweets that create engagement in particular ways. Usually not healthy ways. 

If we think of old media or traditional manufacturing, we can compare them to guilds. Guilds kept up prices and controlled production. With the simplification of tasks factories could hire workers who weren’t as highly skilled but didn’t need to be. Nowadays, why should any newspaper or TV channel’s output be limited by the amount of airtime or page space they have?

Platforms take unskilled and train them. We are in the age of specialization of ideas.  Akin to the “the advantage of disaggregating a productive process”  Platforms leverage this by having many producers explore the same space through millions of different angles. This allows the platform to “purchase exactly that precise quantity of [skill] which is necessary for each process” —paying a viral star a lot and a niche creator a little, perfectly matching reward to market impact. Which is to say platforms make money through whatever sticks.  

In Landes’s essay, Management became specialized, today management will become algorithmized. Platforms abstract away the issues that factory owners had such as embezzlement of resources, slacking off etc. Platforms don’t care how much or how little you produce, or even if you produce. If you do, the cash is yours (after a cut of course). 

This may lead to a visceral reaction against platforms. This week when Substack raised a substantial amount they called the writers “the heroes of culture”. This should ring at least a tiny alarm in your head. The platform’s rhetoric of the creator-as-hero is a shrewd economic arrangement. In the putting-out system, the merchant-manufacturer “was able to shift capital expenditures (plant and equipment) to the worker”. Platforms do the same with creative risk. The writer, artist, or creator invests all the time and labor—the “capital” of creation—upfront. If they fail, they bear the entire loss. The platform, like the putter-outer, only participates in the upside, taking its cut from the successful ‘heroes’ while remaining insulated from the failures of the many.

So what do platforms really do? They have resurrected the essential role of the boss for the digital age. They are the merchant-manufacturers who build the roads to market, and they are the factory owners who discipline production—not with overseers, but with incentive algorithms. By casting the creator as the hero, they obscure their own power and shift the immense risks of creative work onto the individual. While appearing to be mere background IT admins, they are, in fact, the central organizers of production, demonstrating that even in the 21st century, the fundamental challenges of coordinating labor and capital persist, and solving them remains, as it was in the 18th century, a very lucrative role.

What Do Bosses Really Do?, David S. Landes, The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Sep., 1986), pp. 585-623 (39 pages). https://www.jstor.org/stable/2121476

#algorithmicManagement #Business #capitalism #creatorEconomy #digitalLabor #economicHistory #economics #futureOfWork #history #IndustrialRevolution #Leadership #management #monetization #philosophy #platforms #Startups #Substack #techCriticism #technology #writing

How are companies using algorithm-based management and performance tracking, and how do workers perceive them? What are the challenges for works councils and trade unions?

Read this paper via Weizenbaum Journal of the Digital Society #wjds by P Wotschack, L Hellbach, F Butollo:

➡️ https://doi.org/10.34669/wi.wjds/4.3.5

#research #socialscience #work ##LaborRights #AI #AlgorithmicManagement #GigEconomy #DigitalLabor #FutureOfWork #PlatformEconomy @WZB_Berlin @towardsfairwork @tuberlin @FOKUSpublic

#Efficiency #AlgorithmicManagement #AI #HumanRights: "[R]esearchers from MIT find that focusing solely on efficiency can lower employee satisfaction, wellbeing, and performance in the long-run by treating workers like “cogs in a machine” or triggering employees to continue working to the point of exhaustion.

As Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), a coalition of faith-based and values-based investors, and OpenMIC, a nonprofit focused on responsible use of digital technologies, explain in their new report, Dehumanization, Discrimination and Deskilling: The Impact of Digital Tech on Low-Wage Workers, a critical element of algorithmic management systems is the monitoring and surveillance of workers in violation of their human rights. More specifically, the report outlines a number of human rights impacted by digital technologies, including right to privacy (Article 12 in the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights) and occupational safety and health (ILO Convention 155 in 1981 and 187 in 2006).

Worker well-being, satisfaction, and human rights should matter to all investors. When algorithmic management systems detract from them, the resulting higher worker turnover, higher injury rates, increasing regulatory fines and sanctions, and increasing regulation can materially dampen long-term value creation."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bhaktimirchandani/2024/10/01/the-human-cost-of-efficiency-and-why-it-should-matter-to-all-investors/

🚨Extended deadline! 🗓️
Want to travel to Santiago, Chile and join a vibrant community of digital labor scholars? Send us your abstract for #INDL7 "Digital Labor and Power Dynamics" by June 9, 2024. Don't miss out! 🌍📚 Submit now👇 https://www.indl.network/indl-7/ #digitallabor #platformeconomy #ia #gigwork #globalization #data #algorithmicmanagement #latam #chile #conference

Gig-gling at last : EU adopts gig work directive https://www.euractiv.com/section/gig-economy/news/gig-gling-at-last-eu-adopts-gig-work-directive/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #algorithmicmanagement #ElisabettaGualmini

Gig-gling at last : EU adopts gig work directive https://www.euractiv.com/section/gig-economy/news/gig-gling-at-last-eu-adopts-gig-work-directive/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #algorithmicmanagement #ElisabettaGualmini

https://globalmayday.net/dhru/news/

“ the first-ever legislation to regulate #algorithmicmanagement in the workplace and to set minimum standards to improve working conditions for millions of #platformworkers across the EU “

https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2024/03/11/platform-workers-council-confirms-agreement-on-new-rules-to-improve-their-working-conditions/

https://news.err.ee/1609278633/eu-platform-directive-finally-passes-after-estonia-and-greece-vote-in-favor

#Capitalism #deliveryworkers #dhru
Delivery Hero Riders United #SVEOD
https://sveod.gr/?
May 1st 2024 #MayDay
#GlobalMayDay

#Estonia #France #Germany #Greece

At long last, EU countries adopt the platform work directive https://www.euractiv.com/section/gig-economy/news/at-long-last-eu-countries-adopt-the-platform-work-directive/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #algorithmicmanagement #Estonia #Greece #legalcertainty

At long last, EU countries adopt the platform work directive https://www.euractiv.com/section/gig-economy/news/at-long-last-eu-countries-adopt-the-platform-work-directive/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #algorithmicmanagement #Estonia #Greece #legalcertainty

Belgium Presidency hopes for 11th-hour deal with watered-down platform work directive https://www.euractiv.com/section/gig-economy/news/belgium-presidency-hopes-for-11th-hour-deal-with-watered-down-platform-work-directive/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #algorithmicmanagement #BelgiumPresidency

Belgium Presidency hopes for 11th-hour deal with watered-down platform work directive https://www.euractiv.com/section/gig-economy/news/belgium-presidency-hopes-for-11th-hour-deal-with-watered-down-platform-work-directive/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #algorithmicmanagement #BelgiumPresidency

Member states deal heavy blow to platform work deal https://www.euractiv.com/section/economy-jobs/news/member-states-deal-heavy-blow-to-platform-work-deal/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #algorithmicmanagement #coreper #CounciloftheEU #ElisabettaGualmini

Member states deal heavy blow to platform work deal https://www.euractiv.com/section/economy-jobs/news/member-states-deal-heavy-blow-to-platform-work-deal/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #algorithmicmanagement #coreper #CounciloftheEU #ElisabettaGualmini

EU lawmakers nail down rules for platform workers https://www.euractiv.com/section/gig-economy/news/eu-lawmakers-nail-down-rules-for-platform-workers/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #algorithmicmanagement #GDPR #Gigeconomy

EU lawmakers nail down rules for platform workers https://www.euractiv.com/section/gig-economy/news/eu-lawmakers-nail-down-rules-for-platform-workers/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #algorithmicmanagement #GDPR #Gigeconomy

AI Act: EU countries mull options on fundamental rights, sustainability, workplace use https://www.euractiv.com/section/artificial-intelligence/news/ai-act-eu-countries-mull-options-on-fundamental-rights-sustainability-workplace-use/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #AIAct #algorithmicmanagement #artificialintelligence

Now starting the third and final day of our #indl6 conference here in Berlin. Aida Ponce del Castillo (ETUI foresight unit) kicks off the talks with her keynote on platform algorithmic management and policy scenario in Europe.

Follow the livestream on our website: https://www.indl.network
#ai #aiact #platform #algorithmicmanagement

#Surveillance #WorkplaceSurveillance #AI #AlgorithmicManagement: : "Data collection in the workplace has become ubiquitous. Employers use a growing number of information systems to plan, organize and manage workflows and work performed by their employees, most prominently systems for enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM), which are now used by mid- to large-size organizations in most industries. Many systems constantly store digital records about work activities and behaviors of employees. This data is increasingly stored in centralized databases and in the cloud. Employers exploit the data to support managerial decisions, organize work, automate workflows and monitor workers. The technical systems in place are often complex and opaque. Most workers will not be aware of the data flows and decisions that occur in the background while they routinely interact with networked software and devices at work.

This case study explores, examines and documents software systems and technologies used by employers that utilize extensive personal data about the work activities and behaviors of employees to streamline, reorganize and manage work, expand control over workers, subject them to digital monitoring and make automated decisions about them – with a focus on Europe. To illustrate wider practices, it investigates cloud-based software for enterprise data analytics, workflow automation and algorithmic management provided by the German vendor Celonis, based on a detailed analysis of software documentation and other corporate sources."

https://crackedlabs.org/en/data-work/publications/processmining-algomanage/

Algorithmic management in the workplace, Cyber Resilience Act’s positions https://www.euractiv.com/section/digital/news/algorithmic-management-in-the-workplace-cyber-resilience-acts-positions/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #AIAct #algorithmicmanagement #artificialintelligence

EU Commission mulls rules on algorithmic management in workplace for next mandate https://www.euractiv.com/section/artificial-intelligence/news/eu-commission-mulls-rules-on-algorithmic-management-in-workplace-for-next-mandate/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #AIAct #algorithmicmanagement #artificialintelligence #NicolasSchmit

Commission strives to revert to initial text in platform workers negotiations https://www.euractiv.com/section/gig-economy/news/commission-strives-to-revert-to-initial-text-in-platform-workers-negotiations/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #algorithmicmanagement #legalpresumptionofemployment #NicolasSchmit

The Council of the #EU has slightly watered down the #algorithmicManagement provisions in the Swedish Presidency version of the draft Directive on Platform Work. Their summary does not outline how, so let's look through... https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-10107-2023-INIT/en/pdf #PWD #PlatformWorkDirective #PlatformWork #GigEconomy

In case you’ve been hearing about the draft EU #PlatformWorkDirective and wanted to learn more, our paper on its #algorithmicManagement provisions (w Six Silberman & @RDBinns) now out in the European Labour Law Journal.
tl;dr: generally v well drafted, novel aspects worth studying, may create unintended effects, could benefit from some tweaks to avoid tensions and to shore up its complexities in a situation of high power asymmetries. https://doi.org/10.1177/20319525231167983 #gigEconomy #platformWork