The Oppression of the Algorithm

Human Rights Watch has a pretty comprehensive and damning report on how American employers use algorithms to oppress workers. It’s long and very informative. Here’s the beginning:

The future of work is already here. Workers around the world are increasingly hired, compensated, disciplined, and fired by algorithms that can be opaque, error-prone, and discriminatory; their faces, office badge swipes, email exchanges, browsing histories, keystrokes, driving patterns, and rest times are scanned to monitor performance and productivity; even activities outside working hours, such as health and fitness habits, social media usage, and attempts to organize are susceptible to employer surveillance and scrutiny.

Many of these practices have been normalized, if not pioneered, by digital labor platforms, which recruit workers to perform jobs or “gigs” offered through their apps or websites. In 2021, the International Labor Organization counted over 777 active digital labor platforms facilitating web-based microtasks, taxi, and delivery services globally, spanning from India and South Africa to the United States. Within ten years, the number of platform companies has multiplied nearly six times, from the 142 platforms recorded in 2010. Many of these platforms–489 of the 777–are dedicated to providing ride-hailing and delivery services. But their business model is rapidly spreading across multiple sectors of the global economy, including hospitality, health care, and software engineering. The majority of platform companies (79 percent) are situated in G20 countries. Within the G20 countries, 37 percent of platform companies are based in the US and 22 percent are in the European Union.

The US is home to one of the largest markets for labor allocated through digital platforms. In 2021, the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank, found that 16 percent of people in the US have worked for a digital labor platform at least once. Thirty-one percent of current or recent workers reported that this was their main source of income. Food delivery is the most common form of digital labor, followed by performing household tasks, providing rides, grocery delivery, and package delivery.

The growth of digital labor platforms, fueled by the promise that workers are free to set their own schedules and be their own boss, has undermined decades of US labor law regulation and enforcement, denying workers hard-won rights to an adequate standard of living and safe and healthy working conditions.

The business model of major platforms in the US exploits the prospect of flexible work to classify platform workers as independent contractors. This sleight of hand enables platforms to avoid certain taxes and employer obligations, saving labor costs. Under US federal and most state labor laws, independent contractors are not entitled to wage and labor protections guaranteed to employees, such as minimum wage, overtime pay, unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, and paid sick leave. These protections are critical to ensuring the right to an adequate standard of living, and safe and healthy working conditions.

Despite forgoing these protections, many platform workers do not have the same freedoms that independent contractors are supposed to have, such as the freedom to negotiate basic aspects of their work, including how much they are paid. Instead, the platforms studied in this report–Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart, Shipt, Favor, and Amazon Flex–unilaterally set pay rates and deny avenues for wage negotiations. All except Amazon Flex use opaque and ever-changing algorithms that keep workers in the dark about how their pay is calculated.

Independent contractors should also be able to meaningfully control their opportunities for profit and loss. In reality, their earnings are frequently at the mercy of complex algorithmic systems that regulate the frequency and profitability of job requests offered to each worker based on their compliance with performance metrics, such as maintaining high customer satisfaction and job acceptance ratings or making on-time deliveries.

Without labor protections or bargaining power, platform workers, particularly those who work full time, are vulnerable to wages below living and minimum wage standards, wage theft, income insecurity, physical injury while on the job, and unexplained firings without meaningful recourse.

Human Rights Watch interviewed 95 platform workers in the US between 2021 and 2023, in the states of Alabama, California, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, Wisconsin, Oregon, Washington, and New York. Human Rights Watch also conducted a survey in 2023 of 127 platform workers in Texas, which has some of the country’s weakest labor protections.

The nonprobability survey, the first of its kind in the state, is not generalizable to other workers, but provides systematically collected case-level data on subjects that are typically obscure. It found that the median wage among those surveyed was just US$5.12 per hour after deducting work-related expenses and nonwage benefits that form part of employee remuneration. This is nearly 30 percent below the federal minimum wage, which has not kept pace with productivity or inflation since 2009, and roughly 70 percent below the living wage required for single adults with no dependents to meet their rights in the state.

The basis for the study is Texas. But it goes without saying that Democrats have almost as few answers for dealing with these issues as Republicans. We are so far behind in rethinking labor law, which of course benefits employers. Some blue states have done a bit around the edges, but not nearly enough. Of course, what we really need is federal leadership, but even a very solid labor president such as Joe Biden was not really too focused on this kind of thing.