Take Uber, which now operates in over 70 countries. Uber generally treats drivers as self-employed, saying that it merely connects them with customers. Yet its systems set fares and govern access to work. Treating drivers as independent contractors rather than employees leaves them without minimum wage guarantees or employer contributions to social insurance. The company directs the work while shifting much of its cost and risk onto workers.
Our research across platforms and countries, including in Lebanon, Mexico, Pakistan, the UK, Kenya, India, as well as across the Gulf, found striking similarities in platform workers’ experiences. They showed us pay records revealing sharp daily fluctuations in earnings and detailed substantial costs for vehicles, fuel, and other work equipment. On some days, their expenses exceeded their earnings. Some workers injured on the job spent months without income, relying on family and friends or taking on debt to survive.
A delivery worker in Delhi told us he faced financial penalties for missing delivery targets. While rushing to complete an order, he braked to avoid a collision with a motorcyclist, fell, and broke his arm. He paid for treatment himself. “We don’t get anything from the company,” he said.
His experience shows how this system compounds the harm to workers. Algorithmic management pressures them to take risks and punishes them if they fail to comply, while they bear the consequences if the risks cause them to get hurt.
This rapidly expanding and precarious system requires robust regulation of how companies use technology to manage work and accountability for workers’ pay, safety, and social security. Such regulation should, at a minimum, ban algorithmic management practices that pose an unacceptable risk to workers’ rights.
A new international labor convention offers hope that these protections can become a reality. In June, governments, workers, and employers at the UN’s International Labour Conference adopted Convention No. 193 on Decent Work in the Platform Economy by a vote of 406 to 8. It is the first binding international labor standard to regulate algorithmic management for platform workers.
The convention requires ratifying governments to ensure that workers can request written explanations of significant automated decisions that adversely affect their work. Workers must have access to review, with appropriate human involvement, when decisions withhold pay or cut access to work. It also provides safeguards for pay, safety, social security, and the right to organize, although some protections depend on employment status.
Crucially, governments must take measures to ensure correct employment classification, guided mainly by how work is actually performed and paid rather than by the labels a company chooses to apply in a contract.
Together, these provisions address both how technology is used to manage workers and companies’ responsibilities toward them. They give the World Bank a concrete yardstick for some of the “better jobs” it hopes AI will deliver.
The stakes extend beyond ride-hailing and delivery. Research by WIEGO highlights that gig-ification has spread into domestic work, beauty services, and data work, with many of these workers also facing algorithmic control and limited ways to resolve workplace problems. The ILO and the European Commission have also documented algorithmic management in conventional workplaces, including logistics and health care. Workers across these sectors should also be entitled to protection from harmful uses of these systems and effective ways to challenge decisions.
Governments should ratify the new convention, implement it with workers’ participation, and address harmful uses of automated management across labor markets. The World Bank should support these efforts through its advice and financing, helping governments to enforce labor protections and to ensure that workers can challenge decisions affecting their pay or access to work.
In Bangkok and Seoul, “better jobs” should mean a living wage, protection when illness or injury stops someone from working, and the power to negotiate working conditions. These are rights that require enforcement. The institutions promoting AI have a responsibility to help make that promise real.
