Orders and Pay in a Black Box: How Algorithms Shape Gig Workers’ Jobs

For delivery drivers and other gig workers, the workday is largely directed by systems they cannot see or understand. Orders and pay emerge from an algorithmic black box, while workers often do not even know which data companies collect about them.

The issue extends well beyond the monitoring of keyboard strokes and mouse movements. In the gig economy, platforms distribute small jobs to independent contractors and use information from their work to manage the process. Delivery and transport services feed driving times, messages and behavior into algorithms.

Those systems influence the work of the people who depend on them, but the workers themselves usually have little way to understand how. The article places this hidden form of control alongside the broader debate over workplace surveillance, which intensified after reports that Meta permanently monitored employees’ keyboard and mouse activity caused widespread outrage in the United States and Europe.