The rise of the gig economy is disrupting business models across the globe. Platforms’ digital work intermediation has had a profound impact on traditional conceptions of the employment relationship. ...The completion of ‘tasks’, ‘gigs’, or ‘rides’ in the (digital) crowd fundamentally challenges our understanding of work in modern labour markets: gone are the stable employment relationships between firms and workers, replaced by a world in which everybody can be ‘their own boss’ and enjoy the rewards—and face the risks—of independent businesses. Is this the future of work? What are the benefits and challenges of crowdsourced work? How can we protect consumers and workers without stifling innovation? Humans as a Service provides a detailed account of the growth and operation of gig-economy platforms, and develops a blueprint for solutions to the problems facing on-demand workers, platforms, and their customers. Following a brief introduction to the growth and operation of on-demand platforms across the world, the book scrutinizes competing narratives about ‘gig’ work. Drawing on a wide range of case studies, it explores how claims of ‘disruptive innovation’ and ‘micro-entrepreneurship’ often obscure the realities of precarious work under strict algorithmic surveillance, and the return to a business model that has existed for centuries. Humans as a Service shows how employment law can address many of these problems: gigs, tasks, and rides are work—and should be regulated as such. A concluding chapter demonstrates the broader benefits of a level playing field for consumers, taxpayers, and innovative entrepreneurs.
Directly discriminatory algorithms Adams-Prassl, Jeremias; Binns, Reuben; Kelly-Lyth, Aislinn
Modern law review,
January 2023, Volume:
86, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Discriminatory bias in algorithmic systems is widely documented.How should the law respond? A broad consensus suggests approaching the issue principally through the lens of indirect discrimination, ...focusing on algorithmic systems' impact. In this article,we set out to challenge this analysis, arguing that while indirect discrimination law has an important role to play, a narrow focus on this regime in the context of machine learning algorithms is both normatively undesirable and legally flawed.We illustrate how certain forms of algorithmic bias in frequently deployed algorithms might constitute direct discrimination,and explore the ramifications-both in practical terms, and the broader challenges automated decision-making systems pose to the conceptual apparatus of anti-discrimination law.
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3.
Air Passenger Rights Bobek, Michal; Prassl, Jeremias
2016, 2016., 2016-01-28
eBook
Regulation 261/2004 on Air Passengers’ Rights has been amongst the most high-profile pieces of EU secondary legislation of the past few years, generating controversial CJEU judgments, from ex parte ...IATA to Sturgeon. The Regulation has led to equally challenging decisions across the Member States, with domestic courts holding that a Regulation could not be relied upon by an individual claimant, or even threatening outright to refuse an application of its provisions. The economic stakes are significant for passengers and airlines alike, and despite the European Commission’s recent publication of reform proposals, controversies appear far from settled. At the same time the Regulation should, according to the Treaty, have the same direct and general application in all the Member States of the Union. How, then, can this diversity be explained? What implications does it have for the EU’s regulatory strategy at large? This book brings together leading experts in the field to present a series of case studies from 15 different Member States, as well as an overview of the extra-territorial application of Regulation 261, combined with high-level analysis from the perspectives of aviation law and EU law. Volume 3 in the series EU Law in the Member States
To what extent is labour law an autonomous field of study? This book is based upon the papers written by a group of leading international scholars on this theme, delivered at a conference to mark ...Professor Mark Freedland’s retirement from his teaching fellowship in Oxford. The chapters explore the boundaries and connections between labour law and other legal disciplines such as company law, competition law, contract law and public law; labour law and legal methodologies such as reflexive governance and comparative law; and labour law and other disciplines such as ethics, economics and political philosophy. In so doing, it represents a cross-section of the most sophisticated current work at the cutting edge of labour law theory.
Data-driven technologies have come to pervade almost every aspect of business life, extending to employee monitoring and algorithmic management. How can employee privacy be protected in the age of ...datafication? This article surveys the potential and shortcomings of a number of legal and technical solutions to show the advantages of human rights-based approaches in addressing corporate responsibility to respect privacy and strengthen human agency. Based on this notion, we develop a process-oriented model of Privacy Due Diligence to complement existing frameworks for safeguarding employee privacy in an era of Big Data surveillance.
EU Law in the Member States is a new series dedicated to exploring the impact of landmark CJEU judgments and secondary legislation in legal systems across the European Union. Each book will be ...written by a team of generalist EU lawyers and experts in the relevant field, bringing together perspectives from a wide range of different Member States in order to compare and analyse the effect of EU law on domestic legal systems and practice. The first volume focuses on the uneasy relationship between the economic freedoms enshrined in Articles 49 and 56 TFEU and the right of workers to take collective action. This conflict has been at the forefront of EU labour law since the CJEU's much-discussed decisions in C-438/05 Viking and C-341/05 Laval, as well as the Commission's more recent attempts at legislative reforms in the failed Monti II Regulation. Viking, Lava l and Beyond explores judicial and legislative responses to these measures in 10 Member States, and finds that the impact on domestic legal systems has been much more varied than traditional accounts of EU law would suggest.
Since July 2013, recourse to Employment Tribunals in the United Kingdom has attracted fees of up to £1,200 for single claimants. The impact of this reform has been dramatic: within a year, claims ...dropped by nearly 80 per cent. This paper suggests that this fee regime is in clear violation of domestic and international norms, including Article 6(1) ECHR and the EU principle of effective judicial protection. Drawing on rational choice theory and empirical evidence, we argue that the resulting payoff structures, negative for the majority of successful claimants, strike at the very essence of these rights. The measures are, furthermore, disproportionate in light of the Government's stated policy aims: fees have failed to transfer cost away from taxpayers, have failed to encourage early dispute resolution, and have failed to deter vexatious litigants. The only vexatious claims, we find, appear to be those which motivated the reforms in the first place.
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Both tax law and employment law incentivize engagers of labour to structure their workforce as a crowd of self-employed micro-entrepreneurs. Recent technological change and the rise of the gig ...economy have made it easier for agents to respond to these incentives, contributing to an increase in self-employment. In this article, we review the evidence on the rise of the gig economy in the UK and lay out a set of key principles to guide the reform of tax and employment law to better enable policy to meet its underlying objectives.
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This article scrutinises the potential of the existing regulatory apparatus in Union law to tackle the social, technical, and legal challenges inherent in deploying automated systems in high-risk ...settings such as the workplace, with a view to setting out key lessons for the proposed EU Artificial Intelligence Act. Surveying data protection and discrimination rules as well as the social acquis, it highlights key areas for further development, from coherence between different regulatory regimes to the role of social partnership in shaping key standards and monitoring their implementation.
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