A Right of Social Dialogue on Automated Decision-Making: From Workers’ Right to Autonomous Right

Abstract

An emerging tool in the movement for platform workers’ rights is the right not to be subject to automated decision-making. In its most advanced formulation to date in art 22 of the EU General Data Protection Regulation 2016, this right includes ‘the right to obtain human intervention on the part of the controller, to express his or her point of view and to contest the decision’. Among other things, art 22 forms part of the groundwork of the December 2021 European Commission Proposal for a Directive on Improving Working Conditions in Platform Work, with its mantra of promotion of ‘social dialogue on algorithmic management’. In this article, we argue that art 22 and now the Directive offer an important tool for responding to the mechanistic working conditions of platform work. More broadly, we suggest that a right of social dialogue regarding automated decision-making, which art 22 represents, has the potential to serve as a signal achievement in the history of data rights developing to allow democratic involvement in decisions that affect people’s lives under modern industrial conditions.