Food delivery platforms in Spain are categorising their drivers as employees with all the entitlements & protections that flow from this. It took a long legal struggle and a criminal law intervention to force the companies to obey the law but they got there. www.ier.org.uk/comments/the...

Happy May Day! Today I am finishing my working week listening to Adam McGrath's "Wrecker Songs: songs from & for the Maritime Union of New Zealand. " adammcgrath.bandcamp.com/album/wrecke...

🚨BREAKING: The NZCTU has nominated Uber as one of 2026’s Corporate Underminers of Democracy. Wealthy multinationals should NEVER have a say in the laws that protect our people. (1/3) #nzpol

AUSTRALIA: The ‘uberisation’ of part time roles is driving insecurity for women womensagenda.com.au/latest/the-u...

Meta Smart Glasses Wearers data is being manually reviewed by workers who see things like credit card information & obviously intimate private footage. This is authorised by Meta's TOS so I guess Smart Glasses Wearers have consented to this (unlike the rest of us). gizmodo.com/dear-meta-sm...

Spotting this a bit late but very happy to share it - at the Wellington Armageddon pop culture show the amazing Ruby is gonna take over the main stage to throw a bunch of international guests at Monster of the Week! Love to see it!

Stop the AI Surveillance Pipeline. I love this graphical representation of the AI surveillance pipeline by @powerswitchaction.org . As they say our data is "our blood, our tears, our sweat" and we need to fight back. www.datocms-assets.com/64990/177196...

The People's Select Committee have issued their report on the NZ government's rushed pay equity reform. They find there was "flagrant and significant abuse of power". thespinoff.co.nz/politics/24-...

The onion remains undefeated in delivering the most accurate news. theonion.com/ai-chatbot-t...

Oh look, another seemingly automated thing that's actually propped up by poorly paid human beings

"“AI layoffs are looking more and more like corporate fiction that’s masking a darker reality, Oxford Economics suggests”. That darker reality is that the economy is already screwed." The job losses are real — but the AI excuse is fake

Part of the issue is that data is inherently viewed as an asset rather than nuclear waste Ideally, companies would view data as something they only want the bare minimum of in order to function before discarding it as soon as they can Knowing my birthday to send me an email is unnecessary

Also, the 2010s/2020s decline of technical knowledge in management and cloud hosting mania leads to multiple layers of outsourcing between an organisation’s understanding of its privacy requirements and their capability to take action to support those requirements.

It’s almost like New Zealand’s mania for ‘light touch regulation’ isn’t actually effective in protecting ordinary people’s rights, whether it be privacy, health & safety, to take industrial action, to participate in a democracy that has integrity…

“If New Zealand wants to be serious about privacy, then organisations need to be held accountable for their failings […] That includes introducing significant fines, and real consequences.” Privacy Act 2020 turns 5 – changes are needed 1-Dec-2025 www.privacy.org.nz/tuhono-conne...

‪ Why, oh why, do there seem to be so many data breaches in NZ ? “The Privacy Act doesn’t provide sufficient incentives for many organisations to understand or meet even the most basic privacy requirements.” (Michael Webster, Privacy Commissioner, 1 Dec 2025 www.privacy.org.nz/tuhono-conne... )

I wonder to what extent the data from this surveillance technology is/could be used for risk assessment that would lock people out of housing and jobs.

Think Office365 is just about Word, Outlook and Teams? What if we told you it can also be used by your employer to spy on you?

Big Tech’s rollout of algorithmic surveillance tools have made app-based workers’ ability to afford to live #NewYorkCity even more precarious. Policymakers in #NYC can fight back against this latest instance of corporate greed by banning surveillance wage-setting: www.nelp.org/to-make-new-...

"Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices."

Great commentary by Rob Campbell on the profoundly depressing consequences of all the undermining of employment law we've seen in New Zealand this year. www.thepost.co.nz/nz-news/3609... As he says quoting Jim Bolger "“in the end you just have to decide what kind of country you want to live in.”

"This is what happens when any large, concentrated industry is allowed to grow unregulated, and all signs suggest it will get much worse."

I am looking forward to digging into the most recent special issue of the Comparative Labor Law and Policy Journal on Privacy@work digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/cllpj/

In May, Human Rights Watch released a report showing how gig platforms use opaque algorithms to erode workers' wages. Now a new investigation finds Instacart is running AI price experiments: charging different people different prices for the *same* groceries, sometimes by more than 23%. Read this:

To me automatic transcription of video call creates more opportunities for employers to find grounds to dismiss, discipline and fail to promote anyone who commits thought crimes/expresses views or sentiments that dissent from whatever the prevailing view of leadership is at the time .

This thread up and down. Also, I've been beating this drum about the danger to the information ecosystem for six and half years now. A few links below:

Oh this. So much this ⬇️ 👍👍👍👍 #nzpol

On January 1, Illinois begins to regulate employer use of AI, making it a civil rights violation to use AI tools that result in discrimination based on protected characteristics in hiring, promotion, discipline, termination, or other employment terms and requiring notice of AI use. #AIBillofRights

How employers spy on you youtu.be/jBsSLcK6h8A?...

I am looking forward to LSAANZ conference www.canterbury.ac.nz/study/academ... where we'll be launching the book I co-edited with @joshfairfield.bsky.social on workers right to privacy which the printer just delivered. Huge thanks to @juanochoa.bsky.social for the cover art which looks fantastic!

Headline: "AI can replace 11.7% of workforce" Actual study: Anthropic paid MIT to use a "labor simulation tool" that said 11.7% of TASKS could be done by AI

I vividly remember reading Jeremy Rifkind's "the End of Work" back in 1995 as well as Stanley Aronowitz "the Jobless Future". Metaverse hype is another iteration of what people said about Second Life. AGI is another iteration of the Singularity. History doesn't repeat it echos.

"Our experience of technology is usually related to an existing system of power"

Attention Wellington people interested in privacy and workers' rights. Please consider yourself invited to a public lecture and the launch of book edited by me and @joshfairfield.bsky.social at 11.30 a.m GBLT1 on Wednesday 26 November. (More details in the link) www.wgtn.ac.nz/business/eng...

"In writing this article, I realized that I could endlessly tie much of our reporting on attacks on civil society and human knowledge to the force multiplier that is AI and the AI maximalist political and economic project." www.404media.co/ai-is-superc...

Good. Now if only Van Velden would stop attempting to overturn these judgments! The idea that you should be able to avoid your obligations under employment law by simply saying someone is a contractor (regardless of the actual nature of the relationship) makes a mockery of the law.

#nzpol HUGE VICTORY FOR WORKERS: The Supreme Court has ruled in favour of Uber Drivers and their unions, saying that they are employees not contractors. Now the NZCTU Te Kauae Kaimahi is calling on the Government to respect this ruling and uphold the rights of platform and gig economy workers:

Attention people interested in New Zealand employment law- the Supreme Court is releasing its decision on the UBER case on Monday 17 November www.courtsofnz.govt.nz/assets/6-Goi...

In the Inequality.org op-ed, researchers Mishal Khan and Kung Feng lift up four core themes that emerged from their analysis of recent AI principles and statements released by unions and other worker organizations. laborcenter.berkeley.edu/a-first-look...

John Campbell asks is Uber's low pay model the future of work in New Zealand? I'd say, at the rate we are going, yes. More and more people are going to be employed by platforms and it's not clear those platforms will even be in New Zealand. www.1news.co.nz/2025/11/08/j...

Real-time End-to-end Surveillance.

It is beyond upsetting to me how after a tragedy of the magnitude of Pike River the government is weakening our occupational health and safety law. Anna Osbourne and Sonya Rockhouse are asking for signatures to their open letter to the government about this. www.together.org.nz/stand_with_pik

I think the banner of democratisation is a fig leaf to what's really going on which is the dehumanisation, disciplining and disempowerment of ordinary people. Bad tech make us lonely, makes us stupid and makes us scared.

Read more about the project at our website: www.dair-institute.org/projects/dri...

🚨NEW🚨 from DAIR: Today we are releasing "Driven Down", a new report on how workplace technology enables Amazon to steal wages, hide labor, intensify poor working conditions, and evade responsibility. Read the full report here: drive.google.com/file/d/1yBxy...

I think the Public Service Commission has breached good faith here see s32 (iii) of the Employment Relations Act ie. "the union and the employer— (iii)must not undermine or do anything that is likely to undermine the bargaining or the authority of the other in the bargaining"

This is an upsetting article about the underpaid and exploited hidden human labour in the AI supply chain www.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/art...

Andrew Lensen and I have developed a fortnightly newsletter called The Reading List It does exactly what it says on the tin: ten good, interesting or challenging things we've read, watched or listened to in the last fortnight. Did I mention its totally free. open.substack.com/pub/lensenmc...

New Policy Brief by Data & Society "The Privacy Trap: How “Privacy-Preserving AI Techniques” Mask the New Worker Surveillance and Datafication" datasociety.net/library/the-...