At 2pm today, the ADCU, in collaboration with WIE, staged a protest at Just Eat's sumptuous London offices over the company's use of automated decision making to unfairly mass robo-fire 30 of their food delivery workers from the Brick Lane area of East London. This is an area of London famous for its strong community bonds, ethnic diversity and a multitude of local independent restaurants. .
The workers were recently dismissed without notice, warning or right of appeal based on spurious allegations of detected 'fraudulent activity'. Some of the workers were dismissed due to accusations that the device and/or the phone number they used for their unique instance of the Just Eat app had previously been used by another worker. Other couriers were auto-dismissed for having shared their bank account details - something that is common for couples in a domestic relationship who are both working for Just Eat.
Just Eat offered no evidence and made no allegation that the workers had misused their own unique access to the app itself, nor that they had defrauded Just Eat or Just Eat's customers. The Just Eat workers were given no right of appeal and no opportunity to answer the allegations devised and deduced by Just Eat's algorithms. These low paid workers were robo-fired for no other reason than they had pooled their meager resources to share equipment and save costs. Yet Just Eat's risk management algorithm decided that these factors amounted to a risk of 'fraud' and all the workers were dismissed overnight in a mass auto-purge.
James Farrar, Director of WIE said:
Just Eat have flouted employment law for years to cheat the most vulnerable workers out of their right to the national living wage and holiday pay. Now Just Eat are taking further advantage of Britain's notoriously lax enforcement regime to grossly violate data protection law also by unleashing algorithms to surveil, performance manage and brutally purge their own workforce.
BACKGROUND:
Worker Info Exchange and ADCU earlier this year scored a land mark data protection law victory and the the Netherlands Court of Appeal when 3 drivers dismissed by Uber were ruled to have been illegally robo-fired https://www.workerinfoexchange.org/post/historic-digital-rights-win-for-wie-and-the-adcu-over-uber-and-ola-at-amsterdam-court-of-appeal
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