Gig Workers are in the Driver’s Seat in Europe. Is There Hope for the US?

Then, after months of deliberation, on December 9 the European Commission issued a directive intended to provide overall guidance on platform work. Thanks to widespread organizing efforts, several European countries have dealt with a flurry of cases on rights protections for gig workers. To establish some overall clarity for all European Union countries, the Commission took a head-on approach to the employment question. Its new Directive, intended to provide guidance for national legislation throughout Europe, comes out clearly on the side of presuming that those working for platforms are, in fact, employed by the platforms. In this, it mirrors the commonsense “ABC test” in many U.S. state-level laws.

Even better, the EU has taken on a critical 21st century challenge to decent work: platforms can no longer hide behind codes and algorithmic management. Worker organizations in Europe have been contesting for workers’ right to know what data is being collected about them, and how it is being used.

Under the Directive, platform companies will have to make accessible to workers and their representatives information on everything from client ratings to use of surveillance technologies and how that information is being used. Better yet, they will be obligated to make a real human being available in cases where a worker wishes to contest an algorithmically determined decision.

The requirement to put a “human in the loop” is critical. As a staggering new report from Worker Info Exchange shows, earlier claims using Europe’s existing General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) are simply not effective. As the report points out, gig workers have faced an “inordinate amount of unfair dismissals,” situations where the algorithmic black box simply terminates a worker from a platform with no explanation.

Without access to the codes — and the logic of decision-making — workers have had no recourse. As the report illustrates in case after case, individual workers seeking redress on a case-by-case basis are caught in surreal feedback loops, unable to access a real person to whom to explain their claims. In one typical case:

Pa Edrissa Manjang had been working with Uber for about a year when he was deactivated due to a selfie verification failure. . . . Pa was not given any warnings or notified of any issues until his dismissal; the Real Time ID verification system appeared to approve all of his photographs with a green check. Following his dismissal, Pa sent numerous messages to Uber to rectify the problem, specifically asking for a human to review his submissions. Each time Pa was told “we were not able to confirm that the provided photos were actually of you and because of continued mismatches, we have made the final decision on ending our partnership with you.” We obtained the selfies in question through a subject access request, which revealed that all of the photos Pa submitted were in fact of him.

In another typical case, the report describes a driver with a 4.95-star rating who had conducted more than 11,500 trips in over 5 years working for Uber. One day, his son picked up his second phone by mistake and thus he failed to respond to a single ID check that evening. The next day, Uber informed him that his account had been “flagged for suspicious application activity” and permanently closed his account and terminated his work.

Uber also reported the alleged “fraud” to the regulatory authority Transport for London, which immediately revoked the driver’s license. Uber was never compelled to provide any evidence to support the determination of fraud and the record from the actual phone device shows no record of activity in the evening in question.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Bama Athreya.

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