"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

Pluralistic: Rage Against the (Algorithmic Management) Machine (25 Sep 2025)

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/25/roboboss/

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

What I also see a lot in my current research on #peopleanalytics is that #privacy at the #workplace increasingly becomes a privilege for the ranks of the upper management. Privacy should neither be given to you as a commodity or a status symbol, I think it is weird that we have to point that out.

#algorithmicmanagement #surveillance #surveillancecapitalism #workplacesurveillance

As someone relatively new to #norge it is highly important for me to really understand how the #digitalisation of work affects people here differently than it might be the case in Germany, where I am from and where I have studied this topic for years. I found this great policy study on algorithmic management in the nordics and can highly recommend reading this if you are interested in #algorithmicmanagement.

#Norsktut #research #norway #allheimen

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

I find it highly questionable when manufacturers of #PeopleAnalytics or other #AlgorithmicManagement tools talk about how many users they have. Are employees, who become the subject of algorithmic evaluation, really users? I don't think so. When the police use software to "predict" crimes, no one would claim that the supposed "criminals" are users of the software. Yet, it's the same concept.

#workingconditions #unions #employeerights #surveillancecapitalism