Documents Bronowicka, Joanna 3 results

"With the Platform Work Directive still under negotiation and the ETUC calling for an EU Directive on Algorithmic Systems at Work, groundbreaking research into the Spanish-Italian Glovo-Foodinho firm, a digital labour platform, has opened up an alternative path for workers wanting to scrutinize application and access their rights in digitalised workplaces, governed by algorithmic management. This involves closed cooperation between trade unions, reverse engineering and Data protection authorities (DPA).

As illustrated in this report, the current GDPR legislative framework has proven to be both robust and flexible. The report also reveals the details of the collaboration between ETUI and a technical team of experts led by Claudio Agosti into the so-called 'black box'. It details how the algorithmic management systems used by Foodinho, an Italian subsidiary of the Spanish food delivery company Glovo, works to control its workforce, namely:

1.Tracking riders' location outside working hours.
2.Sharing the location (both outside and during working hours), along with other personal data, with undisclosed third parties not mentioned in the app's documentation.
3.Generating a score associated with the rider's personal profile, a value inconsistent with the documented ‘Excellence Score' provided by Glovo-Foodinho: a hidden score.

Background:

In 2019, algorithm analyst, Claudio Agosti, started to work with the ETUI Foresight Unit on research and training courses aimed at understanding the ‘technicalities' behind Artificial Intelligence. Five years later, the ETUI is releasing a technical report which meticulously outlines the techniques used by researchers to observe the internal logic of the app used by riders in Italy and documents its actual behavior in terms of harvesting their personal data.

The technical analysis was made in 2021-2022-2023, after Italian DPA, responsible for enforcing the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) fined the company 2,600,000 euros in 2021 for failing to protect the digital rights of its workers. Glovo appealed. They did not pay the fine and as released in this report, they have continued the same unregular practices. Finally, these new evidences have been reported to the Italian DPA.

New challenges for workers' rights:

According to the authors of this ETUI report, collecting evidence about algorithmic management is critical for workers seeking to enforce their rights by filing complaints with national DPAs or the competent courts. The availability of technical expertise can also help improve workers' negotiating positions in a collective bargaining context. “Ultimately, we believe that, by helping workers understand the apps that control them, we can give them the key to unlocking their rights, thus building a fairer future of work for all.”

"The Platform Work Directive is a victory for workers who mobilised for stronger rights and protection in the platform economy. Workers provided insights about this novel way of work, which fuelled lively academic and policy debates; challenged platforms practices in courts; demanded better working conditions by organising protests and strikes; and urged policymakers to design new laws. That said, in these debates about regulation of platform work, only some workers had their voices heard; others were rarely listened to. This article focuses on typically female experiences in platform work that have been marginalised in research and policy debates; in particular, it looks at digital care platforms. These present a particularly broad diversity of operational models deployed to intermediate between clients and workers. As a result, the paper shows that employment may not, after all, be the ultimate solution to platform workers' problems, at least not for workers who are unable to access the status, for legal or other reasons. In sum, it may be useful, beyond developing indicators of an employment relationship and reducing false self-employment, to discuss how labour rights, independently of status, would have to be designed so as to be more easily enforceable in the social and institutional contexts in which digital labour platforms work. The article concludes that the neglect of gendered perspectives in the development of the Platform Work Directive may render it a blunt instrument for addressing the challenges associated with feminised, informal, and invisible forms of platform work. Nevertheless, despite — or perhaps because of — its limitations, the Directive has the potential to stimulate critical debates on the regulatory reforms needed to close protection gaps for women* and other marginalised workers."

This work is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

"Workplace compliance with existing data protection law appears poor. A variety of reasons explain poor compliance, including lack of legal clarity and under-resourcing of worker organisations (e.g., unions), data protection officers, and data protection authorities. This paper explores what social partners, governments and civil society organisations can do to improve data protection compliance at work, across the following major themes: 1. Existing data protection law provides a range of options for social partners and national governments that have thus far not been fully explored. These options, such as codes of conduct and certification schemes under Arts. 40 and 42 GDPR, could clarify matters that are as yet not fully clear in data protection law, and could improve compliance and reduce the enforcement burden on data protection authorities. 2. Member States should make use of Article 88 GDPR to enact national workplace data protection rules – and social partners and civil society organisations should encourage them to do so. Recent legal developments at EU level have clarified the requirements on national Article 88 laws. This creates an opportunity for Member States to improve legal clarity around application of existing data protection rules to the work context, provide additional substantive protections, and improve compliance and enforcement. 3. Technical experts can assist unions and data protection authorities in auditing algorithmic systems. The complexity and opacity of work-related data processing systems and practices has created a need for technical insight and expertise in assessing whether those systems and practices comply with applicable law. 4. Strategic litigation can help address legal uncertainties and provide financial deterrents against non-compliance. Such litigation has proved fruitful in the area of consumer data processing; its potential should be assessed in the area of work-related data processing as well. This paper elaborates on these themes, providing specific examples and references to relevant literature where appropriate."