“Weakly enforced” data protection laws have resulted in “woefully inadequate levels of transparency” around the use of algorithmic surveillance and decision-making systems in the gig economy, according to a report.
A study published by the Worker info Exchange (WIE), a nonprofit that defends workers’ rights over data employers hold about them, warns against unfair profiling and discrimination the self-employed by automated systems that aim to “maintain operating power” over them.
The report finds that self-employed workers are routinely denied access to their personal data by companies that use machine learning tools to distribute work and manage employees.
The organization also accused platform employers of withholding performance and monitoring data “under the guise of fraud prevention” and of exploiting current data protection laws to “endorse unfair decisions made by machines. », Leaving the self-employed with no way to challenge them.
Strong impact on the daily life of workers
Platform companies operate in a space where they believe they can set the rules, says Bama Athreya, a member of the Open Society Foundations. “Unfortunately, this is not a game: virtual realities have serious consequences for the self-employed in real life,” she says.
WIE’s report comes in the wake of growing concerns about the prevalence of algorithmic surveillance and decision-making technologies in the workplace, especially since the onset of the Covid pandemic.
A study carried out in November 2021 by the Prospect union revealed that a third of employees believe they are subject to some form of surveillance by their employer.
Electronic monitoring and surveillance systems have also been the subject of a report by the European Commission, which warns of significant “psychosocial risks” for workers regularly subjected to decision-making and supervision. automated monitoring.
Haro on the lack of transparency
Kirstie Ball, a professor at the University of St Andrews in Scotland and author of the report, says excessive and intrusive surveillance also threatens to erode employer-employee relationships, unless workers gain a better insight into the situation. how their data is used and human agents play a greater role in overseeing decisions made by machines.
The WIE report points out that platform companies often use legal loopholes to exempt them from fulfilling certain employer obligations or paying taxes or national insurance contributions. This has allowed many of these companies to “disrupt” their industry, allowing them to “scale quickly and build a competitive advantage from an oversupply of unpaid and underpaid workers who expect hard work. work, while depreciating their own wages ”.
Potential changes in terms of compliance with the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the UK, which would give employers greater discretion over how they respond to employee data access requests and reduce their obligation to prepare data protection impact assessments around the processing of sensitive data, also constitute a “hammer blow” concerning the rights of self-employed workers. “In the UK, these already weak digital rights for workers will be fatally compromised if the government’s proposals on the GDPR deviation are passed into law,” the report said.
“All of these problems are compounded by the inability of platforms to respect the digital rights of workers. Our report shows woefully inadequate levels of transparency on the extent of algorithmic management and automated decision-making to which workers are subjected in the gig economy. “
A long judicial road
Getting their cases to court is another challenge for self-employed workers, according to the report. As a result, the broader recognition of the problems posed by the gig economy – particularly at the government level – is lacking.
“Even when workers’ rights were asserted, like in the UK, the government did not enforce these rights on a larger scale. Workers therefore have little choice but to take legal action, if they have the resources to do so, ”the report said. “This is why workers must improve their bargaining power through organization and collective action. The ability of workers to access and pool their data is therefore a powerful organizational force that has yet to be properly harnessed. “
It should be noted that in Europe, the regulation of platform jobs is moving towards a wage presumption. Workers on digital platforms will soon be able to be reclassified as employees when necessary, on the basis of control criteria for the employer defined by the Commission.
Source: ZDNet.com