Food delivery apps urged to reveal how algorithms affect UK couriers’ work
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Campaigners call for transparency from Deliveroo, JustEat and UberEats about how decisions on pay and jobs are made. Takeaway delivery apps are facing pressure to crack open the black-box algorithms that govern the work of more than 100,000 couriers in the UK and reveal more about how decisions are made on pay and access to jobs.
A coalition including the TUC, Amnesty International, couriers’ unions and the campaign group Privacy International claim the opaque use of algorithms is “automating exploitation”. They say withholding vital information from couriers about their work is “creating precarity, stress, and misery”.
The call for greater openness targets UberEats, Deliveroo and JustEat - the UK and Ireland’s three dominant platforms in takeaway delivery with a combined annual turnover of almost £9bn. Just Eat’s 88,000 couriers deliver about 4.7m meals and grocery orders a week. It echoes growing pressure on the UK government to increase transparency about AI systems in the public sector such as the welfare system.
In a letter seen by the Guardian, the workers’ groups accuse the companies of “leveraging black-box algorithms to make decisions about deactivation, work allocation and pay without sufficient explanation, stripping workers of the ability to understand and challenge those decisions”.
The coalition includes the App Drivers and Couriers Union and the Worker Info Exchange, which both represent gig economy workers in the UK. The group said: “We believe the foundation of respect is transparency. Yet current systems withhold vital information from workers.”.
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