Digital Technology, Algorithmic Governance and Workplace Democracy

Algorithmic management and AI-driven technologies in the workplace are impacting workers’ abilities to influence their work conditions, while altering the balance of power between employers and employees within the workplace. This observation serves as a starting point for this edited volume, and in this chapter, we introduce some of the key concepts that readers will meet across this book: algorithmic governance, social dialogue and workplace democracy, emphasizing in particular the terminology of the Nordic model which is fundamental to the understanding of the Norwegian context in particular, while linking the ongoing academic discussions about algorithmic governance and management more directly to questions of power within the workplace and social dialogue. We also briefly summarize each chapter in this volume.

In a comparative perspective, Norwegian working life is characterized by high levels of unionization, tripartite cooperation, strong trade unions and employer organizations, an extensive legal and institutional framework, a compressed wage structure, and a high degree of individual influence for employees. At the same time, several studies suggest that digitalization and artificial intelligence may pose a serious challenge to this model, and thereby also to workers’ ability to influence digital restructuring and change. This chapter reviews the core elements of the model—its historical background, the tools the institutional framework offers to union representatives seeking to engage with digitalization, and the model’s main strengths and weaknesses.

This chapter considers digitalisation and algorithmic governance through the lens of UK call centres. Call centres show how algorithmic governance, performance management and employee surveillance create new ways of seeing and knowing workers. Ranking, classifying and re-presenting output can be at odds with how workers see their role and measure ‘good’ practice but as power rests with the system of algorithmic governance, through its presentation of ‘objective’ data, and management who increasingly rely on data, the worker is disadvantaged. Through a social harm framework understood as barriers to flourishing, the chapter argues that bureaucratic rationality based on algorithmically informed work processes and representations of worker performance are damaging to workers. However, without meaningful engagement in negotiation on these issues, trade unions are unlikely to ensure any balance between the demands of capital and labour. In countries where co-determination is already weak, algorithmic governance is a further blow to workplace democracy.

The COVID-19 pandemic was the crucial escalatory event in the history of digitalisation and algorithmic governance, entrenching conditions that are hostile to union organisation and workplace solidarity as such, while reallocating workers to areas of production most difficult to unionise. Yet across the West, the pandemic was experienced by trade unions as a beneficent reversal of their fortunes, as workers turned to them for protection during uncertain times, governments brought them closer to decision-making than they had been for decades, and—in the US—the new Biden Presidency professed to offer them a privileged role in a post-neoliberal order. ‘The trade union contradiction’ between institutional optimism and disastrous conditions is the common thread connecting very different models of trade unionism: from Nordic countries—where unions are strong but anti-antagonistic and relatively compliant with government agendas—to the UK—where unions are weak but relatively antagonistic to government agendas. This chapter surveys how trade unions responded to the calamity of the pandemic, before offering what has hitherto been lacking: a theoretical vocabulary for how the crisis could have been negotiated with a more robust conception of social harm and with greater ambition for transforming work for the better.

In this chapter, we take a closer look at employee’s rights to utter themselves critically, including whistleblowing in the age of digitization. Firstly, we discuss what makes the topic politically relevant. Secondly, we place the topic in the historical development of the Norwegian working life democracy. Thirdly, we ask how democratic practices are shaped and influenced by digitization. In this context, we make use of a case from the public sector. After employees uttered themselves critically via employee representatives, their utterances were turned into a notification which then was examined using an algorithm-based method. Instead of examining the content of the notice, we argue that the method resulted in a profiling of employees. Even though both the law and collective agreements regulate the implementation of such methods, we show how the provisions are put into play in ways that challenge the balance of power between employers and employees. In this context, we argue that new conditions for power and counter-power arise when governance becomes algorithmic and algorithms rule.

This chapter offers a series of reflections on what I term ‘negotiating the impossible’, a phrase that seeks to capture the on the ground realities of the dramatic power imbalances and unequal battles between trade union representatives and employers, (dis)empowered by the combined force of Big Tech and Big Audit. The chapter draws on insights gained from across several research projects in which we have investigated the effects of digitalization on white-collar workers, new modes of algorithmic governance and management, compliance-oriented regulations, securitization of the workplace, and the role and possibilities of trade unions in negotiating the digital transformation. Using ‘exemplary examples’ from the Norwegian universities and higher education and finance sector, it analyses what I see as the key factors that in our current socio-political, regulatory, and organizational contexts ‘disarm’ trade unions and make their traditional arsenal ineffective vis-à-vis the hybrid forms of management, the infrastructural power of algorithmic architectures, platformization of governance and public procurement policies.

In this chapter we interrogate how digital surveillance technologies in healthcare may transform professional work and impact professional knowledge, discretion, and accountability by functioning as algorithmic management and reinforcing existing regimes of control and responsibilization. We present a case study on the implementation of an AI-based surveillance technology used for the remote monitoring of discharged patients from a Danish hospital ward. In this new arrangement of work, where data act as proxies for the embodied patient, we explore how nurses’ professionalism and accountabilities are challenged and reconfigured. In relation to this, we stress how the use of the AI-based surveillance technology creates new visibilities, allowing for new modes of monitoring and control of professionals’ (re)actions and decision-making, underlining the multidirectional character of surveillance (Lyon, 2018). We demonstrate how a combination of expanded tasks and opacity leads to intensified work and strain for the nurses and their professional relationships, as it simultaneously expands their responsibilities, impedes their professional assessments, and makes their assessments visible and open for surveillance to colleagues and management. Also, the study suggests that testing being a permanent situation, changes work and challenges professionalism in complex ways, and frames the room for co-determination differently from regular implementation of new technology. Our study emphasizes how transformation of power relations may unfold in complex and sometimes subtle ways. Taking as a starting point recent reforms based on digitalization, we describe an increased responsibilization of the professionals, while their powers to deal with possibly conflicting demands and opportunities to prioritize, are not increased.

In an international perspective, Norwegian trade unions participate in extensive social dialogue based on a comprehensive framework of collective agreements and legal regulations at both central and local levels. This chapter uses power resource theory to discuss how trade union representatives and trade union members at the company level relate to digitalization and digital decisions. Digital decisions are understood as decisions concerning the procurement and use of digital tools in both production and management within companies. We use the framework of power resource theory to investigate how and whether digitalization affects social dialogue and the division of power in the workplace, using data from two surveys about digitalization and social dialogue at the company level, and interrogating changes in power resources. In the closing part, we discuss how digitalization may affect the Norwegian micro-model and the various challenges trade union representatives at the company level face in an increasingly digitalized labour market and workplaces.

In Norway, data-driven management remains a top priority within the police; however, recent audits by The National Audit Office of Norway have highlighted that technological ambitions have largely gone unrealised, leading to excessive spending with little to no tangible results. This chapter draws on document analyses and interviews with police personnel and trade union representatives to explore how the socio-technical imaginaries of data-driven management in service staffing nevertheless influence the power relations between employers and employees within the police service. In line with how larger amounts of data and remote monitoring characterise data-driven management, we find that the ideal of data-driven management, together with organisational measures, creates new norms for the relationship between employers and employees. Although the same data system has been used for digital service planning since 1994, the introduction of new actors working remotely in a centralised Service Planning Office, coupled with work schedules that cover many more police officers, makes it more difficult to assess the risks involved in the plans and consult with the trade union and safety representatives, thereby weakening workplace democracy in practice. Furthermore, it reduces local managers’ knowledge of working time regulations, giving them less scope to manage their teams effectively and safely, and giving the system more power.