Robinson and Colleagues Conclude Algorithmic Workplace Grant Project
Professor Hilary Robinson and colleagues from Northeastern University’s College of Engineering and College of Social Sciences and Humanities and Boston College are wrapping up a collaborative project, Understanding the Algorithmic Workplace: A Multi-Method Study for Comprehensive Optimization of Platforms, funded by a three-year, $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation. The interdisciplinary project brought together engineers, social scientists and legal scholars to assess risks related to the digital platform economy, which includes businesses that are facilitated by online sales or technology, such as Uber, Google and Facebook.
“We have developed an analytic tool to understand platform dynamics for workers and firms, interviewed more than 150 platform workers and modelled the impact of a natural experiment in which a platform transitioned its delivery workers to employee status,” said Robinson, who researches the interaction between technological change and legal decision-making in the construction of social order. “To date, our publications have focused on many of the risks that gig workers encounter and how they cope with them. One of our findings is that classifying platform workers as employees does not necessarily reduce the flexibility in work schedules that gig workers prefer.”
Share
Multilevel marketing promises a life of abundance — but for most, it’s an expensive illusion. Advocates are calling for safeguards to stop the cycle of hype and harm.
Professor Claudia Haupt, a First Amendment scholar whose research is situated at the intersection of free speech, health and technology, spent her spring sabbatical at the Institute of European and Comparative Law at the University of Oxford.
Professor Richard Daynard, president of the law school’s Public Health Advocacy Institute, was recently featured in several lengthy articles about his pioneering work fighting Big Tobacco and his new focus on sports gambling as a threat to public health.
