Fair Labor Algorithms
The Challenge
Algorithmic management systems are rapidly transforming workplaces across sectors, from gig platforms to warehouses, call centers, and professional services. These systems automate traditional management functions like work allocation, performance evaluation, and compensation decisions, often with limited transparency or human oversight. Key concerns include:
- Algorithmic Management: Automated systems make consequential decisions about work allocation, evaluation, and compensation with limited transparency, accountability, or appeal mechanisms.
- Surveillance Intensity: Algorithmic management often relies on continuous monitoring and granular performance tracking that can create stress, undermine dignity, and erode workplace trust.
- Opacity and Accountability: Workers frequently lack information about how algorithmic systems evaluate them or make decisions, creating power asymmetries and limiting their ability to contest unfair outcomes.
- Skill Devaluation: Automated management can fragment work into micro-tasks, potentially deskilling jobs, reducing worker autonomy, and undermining career development and fair compensation.
Our Approach
The Global Tech Governance Institute takes a worker-centered approach to fair labor algorithms:
- Algorithmic Accountability Standards: Developing transparency and accountability requirements for algorithmic management systems that enable workers to understand, contest, and shape the systems that govern their work.
- Worker Voice Mechanisms: Researching and promoting models for meaningful worker participation in the design, implementation, and governance of algorithmic management systems.
- Rights-Based Frameworks: Creating legal and policy frameworks that establish and protect worker rights in algorithmically-managed workplaces, including data rights, explanation rights, and contestation rights.
- Alternative Design Models: Exploring and supporting the development of worker-centered algorithmic systems that enhance rather than undermine worker autonomy, dignity, and economic security.
Current Initiatives
Our work in this area currently includes:
Algorithmic Labor Rights Observatory
A monitoring initiative tracking the implementation and impacts of algorithmic management systems across sectors, documenting emerging practices and their effects on workers.
Platform Worker Governance Models
A research and advocacy project developing and promoting models for worker participation in the governance of platform companies and their algorithmic systems.
Algorithmic Impact Assessment Framework
A methodology development project creating tools for assessing the impacts of algorithmic management systems on workers, with particular attention to equity, dignity, and economic security.
Fair Work Algorithm Certification
A standards development initiative creating certification criteria for algorithmic management systems that respect worker rights and promote fair working conditions.
Matrix Integration
Related Programs
Scientific Foundations
- AI Systems Evaluation
Research on measuring fairness and accountability in algorithmic management systems
- Human-AI Interaction
Study of human-centered approaches to algorithmic workplace systems
Key Publications
Get Involved
There are several ways to engage with our work on fair labor algorithms:
- Participate in our Algorithmic Labor Rights Observatory
- Contribute to the Platform Worker Governance Models project
- Attend our workshops and events on algorithmic workplace rights
- Support our research and advocacy work