No 14, Issue 1       

LAYERED BUT ASYNCHRONOUS: EU REGULATION AND THE UNEVEN TIMING OF WORKER PROTECTION UNDER ALGORITHMIC MANAGEMENT

Ștefan MAROȘAN

pp. 56-74

Abstract

The European Union has created a multi-layered system of regulation concerning algorithmic management via the General Data Protection Regulation, the AI Act, the Platform Work Directive and an additional layer which is still being developed. This article examines how this system allocates protection among different types of workers and looks at how Regulation (EU) 2026/1744 changed the timeline of this regulatory structure. Using historical-institutionalist approaches to the concept of layering and drawing on the literature about EU political time, it introduces the idea of asynchronous regulatory protection as a way of understanding the relationship between the timing of regulations and the scope that they cover. A seven-dimensional grid is applied at a single point in time, 2 August 2026. The main finding relates to the sequence of events at the Union level: prior to the amendment, the AI Act’s binding duty to provide employment-specific information was set to come into force four months before the transposition deadline for the Platform Work Directive; following the amendment, it is now set to come into force twelve months after that deadline. The analysis also shows that material and personal scope are to some extent nested and reveals intra-layer temporal decoupling within the AI Act. Regulatory timing becomes distributed when the various layers of regulation differ in terms of what they protect and who they protect.

Keywords: algorithmic management; asynchronous regulatory protection; AI Act; Platform Work Directive; regulatory layering.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.