Algorithms are playing an ever greater role in the workplace, allocating hours, monitoring performance and setting pay. Abigail Gilbert and Jo Marriott from the Institute for the Future of Work explore the impact this is having on workers' rights.
Did you get an Oasis ticket? Many who tried were upset about dynamic pricing, with ticket prices changing according to ‘demand’ and other unrevealed factors. A concert ticket is one thing... but how would you feel if this was how your earnings were set?
For a growing share of workers – this is the case. Uber’s dynamic ‘surge’ pricing adjusts ride fares in real time.
They claim this is based solely on demand: more riders than drivers? Prices spike to lure more drivers online. The system promises efficiency, but for workers can mean unstable and opaque earnings.
How dynamic pricing is undermining workers' rights
Dynamic pricing, often presented as a route to efficiency, has severe implications for workers’ rights and economic stability.
Gig workers experience unstable, unpredictable earnings that often average out to below minimum wage. Importantly, they have no visibility of how prices are set, or means to contest the systems that determine their pay.
These automated, algorithmic decision systems frequently rely on personal profiling and have been shown to replicate racial and spatial inequalities.
Practices like this breach long-standing labour protections, yet we’ve had little public debate about whether this approach is fair or reasonable.
Dynamic pricing is driving anxiety, financial instability, and burnout among gig workers.
The principle that “labour is not a commodity” - enshrined in the International Labour Organisation’s Declaration of Philadelphia - is being quietly dismantled as platform firms position themselves as neutral brokers, despite operating as profit-driven corporations.
This has allowed them to set prices, allocate work, and control performance, all while avoiding the responsibilities traditionally associated with employment.
This missing conversation might reflect more foundational legal debates and assumptions about how we govern markets.
As Lina Khan, who served from 2021 to 2025 as chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) highlights, the influential economists of the Chicago School transformed common understanding of and approaches to regulating markets to in the 90s.
This saw competition law and regulation narrow its focus almost entirely to consumer pricing, abandoning broader concerns like market structure and competitive dynamics. This reflected an ideology of the economy which privileges affordability above all other values.
Such an approach is outdated in the context of radical market concentration and the new dominance of platforms, which mediate market interactions (including between ‘self-employed’ workers, and jobs), but – as corporations with their own motivations - are not neutral brokers.
These motivations have impacts for fair pay, and wider quality of work within the economy in ways which demand further attention and consideration.
The 'gigification' of the wider economy
While dynamic pricing with regards earnings currently seems contained to the gig economy, its foundational ingredient - algorithmic management – is expanding across the economy.
A staggering 90% of American workplaces surveyed by the OECD use some form of digital monitoring. As the Institute for the Future of Work (IFOW) has shown, once labour is measured and managed algorithmically, the conditions are ripe for ‘gigification’.
This is the process by which algorithms are used to predict when and how much labour is needed and ‘match’ workers to these tasks or activities, allowing for two critical shifts:
- A shift from employment to ‘self-employment’
- The potential for dynamic pricing
The Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB) has told us that dynamic pricing is driving anxiety, financial instability, and burnout among gig workers. Worse, these exploitative models are rapidly spreading beyond transport and delivery into sectors like care, logistics, and cleaning.
What needs to change
The gig economy has functioned as a testbed. Dynamic pricing does not only present a legal and regulatory question. Like many other facets of social transformation driven by the greater use of AI, it presents a fundamental normative question and invites us to reflect on the values that underpin our social world.
These changes to work require a new conversation about the purpose and limits of market logic, how this does or should not apply to workers, and how competition law considers workers within its broader remit.
But other more immediate interventions can manage risks arising from poor transparency and regard for impacts of algorithmic systems on workers. Research at IFOW shows that when businesses do think about the impacts of novel technology before adoption, they can achieve both improved productivity and better work.
While some employers are spearheading such approaches, to ensure all firms do this, we look to the forthcoming AI Bill to require Workplace AI Risk and Impact Assessments, akin to those proposals already made for the Employment Bill.
While there will need to be learning, and reflection as to how to get this right - we have the processes, and architectures to develop a world-leading model for workplace AI regulation in the UK.
The Institute for the Future of Work is an independent research and development institute exploring how new technologies are transforming work and society. We fund it as part of our decent work programme.
Dr Abigail Gilbert is IFoW's co-director and Jo Marriott is head of partnerships.
