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.”