Veena Dubal, Professor of Law, University of California, Irvine; Vitor Araújo Filgueiras, Projects Manager, Fundacentro (Brazilian Ministry of Labor); Professor of Economics, Federal University of Bahia
Debate about the regulation of “digital labor platforms” abounds globally among scholars, legislators, and other analysts concerned about the future of work(ers). In 2024, the European Parliament passed a first-of-its kind “Platform Work Directive” aimed at extending and growing protections for workers who labor for firms that utilize “automated systems to match supply and demand for work.” In this Essay, we consider the problematics of regulating the digital labor platform as a distinct subtype of firm and “platform work” as a novel form of employment. We propose that digital platforms are not firms, but rather labor management machines. Thus, the Directive is vastly underinclusive in its extension of much-needed rights to workers who toil under algorithmic decision-making systems. Using extant empirical evidence from both the United States and Brazil of occupational injuries faced by workers who interact with platforms (as disciplinary machines, not as firms), we show that, like early-Twentieth-Century industrialists who employed new mechanical systems for production, contemporary firms using platforms cause workers to suffer high rates of physical and psychosocial injury. Accordingly, lawmakers across the globe should consider how firms in many sectors use these digital machines to increase control of the labor process and how this heightened control impacts worker health and safety. By recognizing the contemporary social relationship between firms and workers, legislators can regulate algorithmically managed work to make it safer, more tolerable, and more dignified.