Regulating AI in the workplace: A critique of the EU AI act and the platform work directive through a worker-centred lens

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in the workplace is reshaping labour processes by automating managerial functions such as task assignment, supervision and evaluation, deepening power imbalances and creating new worker vulnerabilities. Platforms are central to this debate, remaining key sites where algorithms structure and control work. In response, the EU introduced its first comprehensive AI regulatory framework in 2024: the AI Act and the Platform Work Directive (PWD). These initiatives are expected to play a decisive role in shaping platform governance, while the AI Act also extends more broadly to algorithmically managed workplaces. However, the AI Act allows industry self-assessment, limits oversight and provides minimal worker protection. By contrast, the PWD addresses algorithmic risks more robustly, including correct worker classification and greater transparency, though its scope is limited to platform workers. This creates a fragmented framework: broad but weak protections under the AI Act versus stronger but narrower rights under the PWD. This article critically assesses the EU's regulatory framework, arguing that dominant approaches reduce worker participation to symbolic gestures, based on an assumed harmony between labour and capital. As an alternative, it advances a worker-centred perspective grounded in the recognition of conflict and the view of technology as a contested space. This approach offers an alternative understanding of platform governance while simultaneously aiming to strengthen workers and trade unions across sectors by broadening the scope of transparency information rights, veto powers, and collective bargaining cut in half keeping reference to platform governance as a key part of the debate.