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Part V: Europe's Answer

Europe has answered the AI boss in part, and in several layers at once. The AI Act classifies AI used in employment, workers' management and access to self-employment as high-risk (Annex III, point 4), prohibits emotion recognition in the workplace (Article 5(1)(f)) and requires deployers to inform workers' representatives and affected workers before such a system is put into service (Article 26(7)). The GDPR restricts decisions based solely on automated processing (Article 22) and allows member states to set more specific rules for employment (Article 88). The Platform Work Directive, Directive (EU) 2024/2831, regulates algorithmic management in platform work and must be transposed by 2 December 2026. Beneath these instruments lie the national systems of co-determination, collective agreements, occupational safety and equality law, which in many member states constrain what an employer may delegate to a machine more tightly than any EU instrument does.

This part reads these layers as an architect reads requirements: article by article, attributed to the instrument, and translated into what an organisation must design, record and be able to show. It is not legal advice, and it says where national law differs and where the application of an instrument is still expected rather than settled.

Chapters in this part:

  • Chapter 21, The AI Act at Work: Annex III Point 4, Prohibited Practices and the Deployer's Duties, sets out what the AI Act requires of an employer that deploys a system that manages people, from human oversight and logs to the fundamental rights impact assessment and the right to explanation.
  • Chapter 22, Data Protection and the Platform Work Directive: The Right to a Human Decision, examines GDPR Articles 22 and 88, the case law on automated decisions at work, and the Platform Work Directive's rules on monitoring, human review and the right to contest.
  • Chapter 23, Co-determination: Works Councils, Unions and the Nordic Model Meet the Algorithm, examines co-determination under the German Works Constitution Act, the Swedish Co-determination Act and the Nordic collective-agreement model, and how it applies to systems that change continuously.
  • Chapter 24, Occupational Safety, Equality Law and the Public Authority as Employer, examines the Framework Directive on safety and health at work, equal-treatment law, and the particular duties of a public authority that procures the AI boss from a supplier.

Management functions in this part. Chapter 21 concerns all five functions, because Annex III, point 4 covers recruitment, promotion, termination, task allocation and the monitoring and evaluation of performance and behaviour. Chapter 22 concerns chiefly M3 Consequence, where the right to a human decision bites. Chapter 23 concerns M1 Direction and M2 Evaluation, where co-determination over technical monitoring applies, and M5 Care. Chapter 24 concerns M5 Care and M3 Consequence. Every chapter names the functions it concerns in its opening and its Summary.

The thread from Part IV. Part IV established that accountability must end with a named person and that decision rights must be written down. Part V shows that European law already requires much of this, in different words and by different instruments, and that the requirements overlap. An employer that designs one set of records and one delegation register can satisfy several instruments at once; an employer that treats each instrument separately will produce several sets of documents and still not be able to show a worker why a decision was made. The overlap is the bridge to Part VI.

What you will learn in this part:

  • Which provisions of the AI Act, the GDPR and the Platform Work Directive apply to systems that manage people, and from when
  • How co-determination and collective agreements govern the introduction and change of such systems
  • How occupational safety and equality law constrain algorithmic pace and scoring
  • What a public authority owes its staff when the AI boss is procured
  • How to turn each obligation into a record, a control or a design decision

Part VI turns these obligations into a design.