The second vice president of the Government and Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, announced this Thursday what the big technology companies, Cabify or Amazon, are doing in their relationship with their workers. The warning is preceded by the , which would affect 1,200 corporate office employees, and to comply with it the Government will have to rely on regulations that are still incipient. The regulation of these issues is relatively recent, it is even being developed or being progressively implemented, hence the difficulty for . But Spain already has two reference standards that refer to these aspects: the Workers’ Statute and the Law on the Projection of Personal Data and guarantee of digital rights.
In its article 64, it indicates that, within the rights of information, consultation and powers of the workers’ representatives (works committee), there is the right to “be informed by the company of the parameters, rules and instructions on which the algorithms or artificial intelligence systems that affect access and maintenance of employment, including the creation of profiles, are based.” Failure to comply with this obligation does not entail a specific sanction, but does fall within the Law on Sanctions and Infractions of the Social Order (LISOS). In this rule, failure to comply with the duties of information to the legal representation of workers is a serious infraction that, depending on its degree (minimum, medium or maximum), is punishable by fines for the company of between 751 euros and 7,500.
But Díaz referred more specifically to the use of these algorithms in labor organization. In that sense, he assured that his department will not “condone” the “Amazon model of working 120 hours a week, of having surveillance bracelets to know how long the employee goes to the bathroom, something that not only Amazon does.” These cases would be regulated more precisely in the regulations. This text, in its article 88, regulates the right to privacy and use of digital devices in the workplace. And it points out that “the employer may access the content derived from the use of digital media provided to workers for the sole purpose of controlling compliance with labor or statutory obligations and guaranteeing the integrity of said devices.”
Furthermore, if the company provides digital devices and allows their private use, the standard requires that “the company precisely specifies the authorized uses”; and also to determine the periods in which the devices can be used for private purposes, among other things. The next three articles of this standard (89, 90 and 91) regulate, respectively, the right to digital disconnection in the workplace, the right to privacy against the use of video surveillance and sound recording devices in the workplace, and the right to privacy against the use of video surveillance and sound recording devices in the workplace.
Community standards
Outside the national level, there are two community regulations that also cover the use of algorithms in the workplace in the European Union. The first is the European Regulation on Artificial Intelligence, whose contents are only partially valid, since the entry into force of the full text is scheduled for August 2 of next year 2026. This regulation determines which are the “high risk” areas, according to the terminology it uses, in the use of algorithms and artificial intelligence. The work environment is precisely one of them and is specified as such.
However, and for the moment, the rights included in this standard regarding the use of these tools at work are fundamentally of prevention and information nature. For example, companies are required to prepare risk prevention plans for the use of computer applications, as well as expressly communicate to the legal representatives of the workers and the employees themselves that they will be used.
Finally, it also includes a regulatory part of the use of algorithms and artificial intelligence. Here there are strict rules for the use of algorithms when they affect the assignment of tasks, performance evaluation, fees, blocking or expulsion from the platform, and other working conditions. Likewise, it prohibits companies from making decisions regarding their workers based exclusively on algorithms without human intervention. This directive has been partially transferred to the Spanish legal system through what is known as rider lawwhich regulates the situation of home delivery workers and has served as the basis for ordering their inclusion as employees in the workforce of companies, which originally resorted to the figure of the false self-employed, according to numerous court rulings.
