Fairwork US Ratings 2025: When AI Eats the Manager

For healthcare workers, an algorithmic scheduling software programme approves a worker for a shift, notifies both the medical facility and the worker, allows the worker to clock in and out, and, finally, sends a pay check. For elderly care workers, the automated programmes embedded in an app process requisite documents, reschedule shifts, monitor a worker’s GPS location (and push notifications to workers if they are too far from their next client to be on-time for a shift), and prompt workers to conduct wellness surveys with clients and record their answers. For ride-hail and delivery workers, the AI-generated chatbot stands in for most forms of human management. Workers contest pay discrepancies through the chatbot, cancel shifts, report problems with unexpected delays or restaurant closures, request support in cases of emergencies, and more.

The reality of working with AI is different from the promises associated with it. AI is, to put it descriptively, eating the managers. This Fairwork 2025 US Report documents this process as well as how platform companies and their AI-powered technologies have gained a foothold in previously unthinkable sectors, such as healthcare. On-demand nursing companies are eroding the basic tenets of patient care and social protections in a professionalised sector, with the promise of flexibility and higher pay. The report brings together well-known platforms and emerging on-demand labour firms to provide a snapshot of the working conditions for platform workers in the US.