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Italy: Bologna Labour Court held a previously used algorithm of a platform company as discriminatory

  • In the complaint filed by trade unions, the Court ordered the company to modify its algorithm as to avoid any type of discrimination, give publicity to the decision, and to pay damages for an amount of EUR50,000

On 31 December 2020, the Labour Court of Bologna ruled on a complaint presented by the Italian Federation of Transport Workers and other trade unions (members of CGIL, the Italian most presentative trade union), against the platform company Deliveroo Italia S.R.The unions’ complaint aimed at “ascertaining the discriminatory nature of the conditions for access to the working sessions of the digital platform”.

The decision deals with the nature of an algorithm used by a platform company and how this could have potentially affected Deliveroo’s workers.

By looking at the system of rules, incentives and sanctions given to workers in terms of their shifts time and delivery opportunities, the judge considered that the algorithm indirectly discriminated workers as it evaluated them only considering their “reliability and participation”. This resulted in a ranking system whereby the most reliable and participative workers could access the best work shifts and gave availability for more deliveries.

However, if the worker was, for any reason including for illness, obliged to waive his/her availability less than 24 hours prior to the shift, he/she would be downgraded and have to build up his/her ranking again.

The company claimed that the algorithm was no longer in use as of 2nd November 2020 and therefore the demands of the trade unions are no longer useful.

The Court was not able to review the content of the algorithm and therefore could rule only on the basis of witnesses’ users of the system. On this basis, the Court ordered the company to modify its algorithm as to avoid any type of discrimination, publish the decision on Deliveroo webpage (FAQ section) and on an Italian newspaper, and to pay damages for an amount of EUR50,000 to the complainants plus EUR7,254 for litigation fees.

The company commented that “We take note of the judge's decision which we do not agree with - says Matteo Sarzana, general manager of Deliveroo Italy - and which refers to a booking system for rider sessions that is no longer in use”. “The correctness of our old system is confirmed by the fact that not a single case of objective and real discrimination emerged in the course of the trial. The decision - he added - is based, exclusively, on a hypothetical and potential evaluation without concrete evidence”.