A courier waits outside an apartment block in the rain for nine minutes because the customer wrote the wrong gate code. The food is fine, the delivery is fine, but the handover is awkward and wet and late-feeling. That evening the customer, mildly annoyed at the world, taps four stars instead of five. Nothing happens to the customer. For the courier, the tap lands in a system that never forgets it, averaged into a score that quietly governs whether the next shift offers good orders or bad ones — and, eventually, whether the app keeps him at all.
This is the curious thing about gig work: an industry built on the claim that it employs nobody has produced some of the most intensive management ever devised. The platforms describe themselves as marketplaces — neutral digital noticeboards connecting independent contractors with people who need things moved, cleaned, driven or delivered. Yet the marketplace sets the price, assigns the jobs, monitors performance in real time and dismisses workers, often automatically. Every one of those is a function of management. The only managerial function the platforms have genuinely declined is the one where management owes you something.
The rating is the hinge on which all of this swings, and it deserves more suspicion than it usually gets. A star score feels trivial — customer feedback, the same texture as reviewing a toaster. But in the architecture of platform work it is not feedback. It is a personnel file, assembled by strangers, one bad day at a time. The customer does not know they are conducting a performance review. The worker cannot see the evidence, challenge the witness or explain the gate code. And because the score is a number rather than a decision, no single human being ever has to take responsibility for what it does.
That last part is the mechanism worth staring at. When a traditional manager fires someone, a person fires someone; there is a meeting, a reason, a name attached to the choice. When a platform deactivates a worker, the event arrives as a notification — an account disabled, an appeal button that leads to a form, a form that leads to a reply that reads like it was written by the same system that made the decision, because it was. The score makes this legible as a system rather than legible as a decision, and that distinction is the whole business model. Systems do not have to justify themselves. Decisions do.
The law notices the person behind the curtain
Regulators have spent the past few years trying to reattach responsibility to the machinery, and their efforts cluster around two moves: reclassifying the worker, and forcing the algorithm into the light.
The most sweeping is the EU’s Platform Work Directive, formally adopted in October 2024 after nearly three years of negotiation. It introduces a rebuttable legal presumption: where a platform exercises control and direction over a worker, the relationship is presumed to be employment, and it is the platform — not the worker — that must prove otherwise. That is a deliberate inversion of the status quo, in which the burden of litigating classification falls on the person with the least money and the least time. Just as significantly, the directive’s algorithmic-management provisions apply to all people performing platform work, whatever their classification: platforms must inform workers about automated monitoring and decision-making, and there are hard limits on what data the system may touch, including a ban on surveilling private conversations between workers. Member states have two years to write it into national law.
Spain got there earlier, and went further in one specific way. Its 2021 “Rider Law” did two things at once: it created a presumption of employment for delivery riders managed through platform algorithms, and — in a provision that attracted less attention — it gave works councils the right to be told the parameters, rules and instructions behind any algorithm affecting working conditions, hiring or firing. Read that second provision again. It treats the algorithm as what it functionally is: a workplace rulebook. If a human manager’s policies must be disclosed to employee representatives, why should the same policies become a trade secret the moment they are written in code?
The courts, meanwhile, have been unimpressed by the marketplace story. In February 2021, the UK Supreme Court ruled in Uber BV v Aslam that Uber drivers are “workers” — an intermediate category under British law carrying minimum-wage and holiday rights — and that their working time includes time spent logged into the app and available for assignments. The judgment’s reasoning cut through the contractual fiction with some elegance: Uber sets the fare, dictates the terms, penalises drivers who decline trips and uses ratings to manage performance. A marketplace does not do those things. A boss does.
The score is the tell
It would be easy to frame all of this as a labour-law problem, a question of which legal box a courier belongs in. But the rating system is doing something stranger and more durable than misclassification. It has externalised the emotional cost of management onto customers and externalised the evidentiary burden onto machines, leaving a structure in which power is exercised constantly and owned by no one. Ask a platform why a worker was deactivated and the honest answer is: nobody decided. The score decided. The score, of course, is made of people — tired passengers, wrong gate codes, a four-star tap in the rain — but it has been laundered through enough aggregation that it can wear the innocence of arithmetic.
The new wave of regulation is best understood as an attempt to break that innocence. Transparency requirements say the rulebook must be readable. Presumptions of employment say the burden of proof belongs with the powerful. Human-review requirements say a notification is not a process. None of these reforms abolishes the score; work will still be rated, because customers like rating things and platforms like being rated. But the direction of travel is toward a simple principle with an old pedigree: if you manage people, you are a manager, whatever your terms of service say. The oversight the platforms built is total — Eurofound surveying across Europe has found roughly three-quarters of platform workers subject to constant time tracking — while the relationship, officially, does not exist.
The courier in the rain never finds out which delivery cost him the star. That anonymity is usually described as a privacy feature for the customer, and it is. But it is also the perfect emblem of the arrangement: everyone in the system can see the worker, and the worker can see no one. The platforms built a panopticon and called it a noticeboard. The law, at last, has started reading the noticeboard’s fine print — and discovering, under the stars, a manager’s signature.