"Negotiating the Algorithm: Trade Union Manual,"

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Algorithmic management is the use of data-powered algorithms to deliver management instructions and control the labour process. The spread of algorithmic management has fostered new risks for European workers, especially those in the platform economy.

Algorithmic management is used to determine work allocation and pay in ways that are typically opaque and often discriminatory. Platform workers have to content with intensive forms of surveillance which reduce autonomy and undermine privacy. Workers are evaluated in ways that are not transparent and with no opportunity for worker input. Perhaps worst of all, workers face algorithmically-determined punishments, up to and including the loss of their job, sometimes without ever being able to communicate with a human boss.

To address these problems, it's imperative that workers and unions 'negotiate the algorithm'. In this report we use this term on the basis it was originally intended; to negotiate collective agreements between employers and unions over the use of algorithmic management. But we also use it more broadly to refer to all trade union activity which relates specifically to the algorithmic mangement of workers, including case work, legal actions, political lobbying and research...