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 assembled a layered regulatory architecture for algorithmic management through the General Data Protection Regulation, the AI Act, the Platform Work Directive and a further layer under development. This article asks how that architecture distributes protection across categories of workers and how Regulation (EU) 2026/1744 altered its temporal configuration. Drawing on historical-institutionalist accounts of layering and the EU political-time literature, it develops asynchronous regulatory protection as a framework for analysing the interaction between regulatory timing and personal scope. A seven-dimension grid is applied at a common observation point, 2 August 2026. The central result concerns nominal Union-level sequencing: before Regulation 2026/1744, the AI Act’s binding employment-specific information duty was scheduled four months before the Platform Work Directive’s transposition deadline; after the amendment, it is scheduled twelve months after it. The analysis also finds that material and personal scope are partly nested and identifies intra-layer temporal decoupling inside the AI Act. Timing becomes distributive when regulatory layers differ in what and whom 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.