Will AI oversee more workers?

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Algorithms-as-managers keep seeping into our workplace landscape, creating work orders, handling timesheets, tracking performance, and other tasks.

At this time, algorithmically managed jobs range from from ride-sharing to food delivery to short-term tasks. But the time is coming in which regular, full-time jobs will be guided, to some degree, by algorithms – for better or worse.

The worse side means worker activities will be micro-measured and subject to machine scoring of performance. On the better side, potentially favorable to workers, is that all this data will be generated, captured, stored. This data will be the lynchpin of employee relations, as explored in a recently released guidebook, Negotiating the Algorithm, released by ETUC, a consortium of European trade unions.

The rise of algorithmic management to guide and monitor platform-based work has implications for unionized workforces, which could break in a favorable or unfavorable way, the guidebook points out. But one does not have to be part of a union to be concerned how to negotiate employment or engagement terms in this emerging realm of management-free workplaces.

The ETUC manual foreshadows the coming difficult relations that may arise between companies and employees – particularly “platform workers” – as we advance further into the AI age. If unions, for one, do not adapt and gain an understanding of data tools and technology, they risk becoming irrelevant. Hard-line management practices could be baked into algorithms, with little recourse for employees.

Transparency is the key to fostering fair working arrangements, the manual emphasizes. This includes data-sharing, with information collected from AI systems available to employees monitor, test, and verify employment agreements, as well as challenge company decisions. “Data recovery and analysis, when done well, will strengthen the power of workers and unions by providing them with more and better information to make informed decisions” as the platform economic grows.

Again, all employees who are working for AI bosses can benefit from this perspective. Data is power.

Without such open data sharing, algorithmic management poses serious challenges for employees and their trade unions,” said tech-world activist Cory Doctorow in his analysis of the ETUC guidelines. “It gives bosses a massive information advantage over workers at the bargaining table, capturing fine-grained information about activity on the shop floor. It creates opportunities for bosses to violate collective bargains on a per-worker basis, changing the work conditions and pay for every worker and even for every job. It lets bosses spy on workers even when they’re not on the clock, and offers many ways for bosses to retaliate against workers.”

Workers trapped by algorithmic management “are stripped of agency and problem-solving opportunities,” Doctorow added.

For gig and platform workers in the European Union, at least, there is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the soon-to-be-implemented Platform Work Directive, which is intended to protect platform workers’ rights to information and consultation. GDPR “bans hidden internal evaluations of workers,” said Doctorow. “It also gives workers the right to demand human intervention in automated decision-making.”

The Platform Work Directive extends the GDPR to “ban processing a worker’s personal data in relation to: their emotional or psychological state; private exchanges; when they are not using the app; on the exercising of fundamental rights including worker organizing; things that are personal to the worker including sexual orientation and migration status; biometric data when used to establish that person’s identity,” Doctorow explained.

It remains to be seen how platform worker relations are managed outside of the EU, such as in in North America, which currently doesn’t have strong protections. But the EU example provides a look at the shifting power dynamic between platform workers and hosting companies. Also, significantly, such rules codify the changing nature of work, evolving from formal 9-to-5 full-time workweeks to flexible gig work. If handled the right way, workers will have wide opportunities to assemble composite careers and increase their income potential.