On Tuesday 15 July, the members of the European Parliament’s Employment and Social Affairs Committee gave their broad support to the own-initiative report by Polish MEP Andrzej Buła (EPP) on the challenges of algorithmic management in the workplace, which explicitly calls on the Commission to present a draft directive on the subject.
All the groups supported a draft regulatory framework and insisted on the principles of transparency, employee information, human supervision of all sensitive decisions such as promotions, contract changes or redundancies, as well as a ban on emotional surveillance, off-duty activities or real-time monitoring.
According to the Polish rapporteur, “more and more often, an algorithm can decide who stays on the payroll, who will receive a bonus, who will be made redundant, and can assess productivity”. His report is by no means a “statement of mistrust of technology”, but essentially proposes adapting employer-employee relations to the new nature of work and calls for a clear legal framework, both for the employer and to ensure a “sufficient level of awareness, training and transparency for the employee”.
Because algorithmic management at work and the use of artificial intelligence can have a major impact on workers, we “need basic guarantees” and must not “turn a blind eye to the threats, the unnecessary pressure on workers and the risks of exclusion”.
The aim of a directive would not be to “add layers of bureaucracy”, as the rapporteur considers it important for companies to be competitive.
Its draft directive would therefore target a number of basic principles, such as the right to information, covering the purposes of data collection, the type of data, the justifications for certain algorithmic decisions, human supervision of decisions that are important for workers, the obligation to consult workers’ representatives, and the strict protection of personal data and clear boundaries with data that cannot be processed.
The directive is “the most appropriate instrument, because this is a horizontal problem that concerns the single market”, argued Mr Buła.
The S&D group, through Marc Angel (Luxembourger), welcomed this call for a legislative initiative. Health and safety at work must not be forgotten either, he said.
The Renew Europe group will also be tabling amendments on trade unions and social dialogue, as well as additional safeguards against real-time monitoring, said Irena Joveva (Slovenian).
For Leïla Chaibi (The Left, French), this report is an excellent basis for a future legislative initiative.
The MEP advocated taking some inspiration from the directive adopted in 2024, in terms of the principle of human supervision and the definition of the workers concerned, which could be revised to cover apprentices, trainees and all workers in a grey area between employee and self-employed.
For its part, the ECR group felt that this own-initiative report could lay the foundations for a “clear and rigorous regulatory framework”. Italy’s Francesco Torselli, for his part, called for workers to be kept constantly informed and on the issue of ownership of the data processed.
Link to the report: https://aeur.eu/f/hds (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)