Reordering Labour Rights Under Compound Pressure: Algorithmic Management, Mediated Autonomy, and Legal Innovation in China

Abstract

The Future of Jobs Report 2025 identifies technological change, geoeconomic fragmentation, demographic shifts, and the green transition as compounding forces restructuring global labour markets. Rather than merely adding new risks, these pressures erode the foundational assumptions upon which labour rights rest, widening the gap between workers’ lived conditions and the reach of existing legal frameworks across international, regional, national, and platform levels. Algorithmic management serves as the focal case through which these pressures converge. In platform and conventional workplaces alike, technical systems now allocate tasks, price labour, rank workers, enforce sanctions, and determine classification, cutting across traditional boundaries separating labour law, private law, data protection, and AI regulation. Two analytical concepts organise the argument. Mediated autonomy denotes a condition in which workers retain nominal choice, yet that choice is structured in advance by systems governing incentives, visibility, risk, and legal categorisation. Algorithmic subordination captures the resulting form of control: indirect, informationally asymmetric, and legally dispersed dependence on data flows, automated rankings, and code-driven decisions. Drawing on the philosophy of technology and classificatory looping theory, the article demonstrates that legal and technical categories do not merely describe workers; they actively constitute the field within which workers bear risk and assert entitlements. Biometric monitoring and affective computing intensify this dynamic by extending managerial authority to bodily signals and inferred emotional states. China’s regulatory approach to non-standard employment is examined as a case study and compared with the EU’s status-and-algorithm model, situating both within broader patterns of global regulatory divergence. The article concludes that effective labour protection must move beyond employment-status classification toward control-sensitive and technology-sensitive frameworks, encompassing transparency obligations, contestation rights, human review mechanisms, fair remuneration, data minimisation for biometric and affective information, and meaningful worker participation in platform governance.