Name: Refusing the Quantified Subject: Labour and Criminal Law Perspectives
Start: 2026-07-09T12:00:00+02:00
End: 2026-07-09T14:00:00+02:00
Location: Weicker Building

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This workshop examines normative limits on algorithmic control and classification—bringing labour and criminal law perspective into dialogue

Abstract

The employment relationship is built on subordination. The contract grants the employer a prerogative to direct, monitor and discipline the worker, which collective rights and the individual protections of modern labour law have historically tempered. That prerogative now extends into a domain where tasks are quantified, predicted and governed by machines. AI does not create a new authority at work but intensifies the old one: algorithmic systems generate assignments, monitor execution and evaluate output, rendering the worker into data in what has been termed the era of the quantified worker. Yet no universal model protects workers in this age.

The dynamics of algorithmic governance are not confined to the workplace. Across criminal justice systems, predictive technologies increasingly classify individuals according to inferred “risks”, propensities, and behavioural forecasts, normalising forms of intervention that precede wrongdoing itself. While algorithmic management transforms workers into datafied objects of optimisation and control, predictive criminal justice systems similarly reduce individuals to probabilistic subjects of suspicion.

Against this backdrop, the workshop will be divided into two parts. The first half of the workshop will turn to the right to refuse work — tracing its origins, history and conceptual foundations, and asking whether it remains viable in the age of AI. Drawing on the intersection of AI and occupational safety and health, it will argue for the right to refuse as a guiding principle under algorithmic management.The second half of the workshop will explore the possibility of a right to freedom from algorithmic classification as a normative limit on AI-driven governance. Grounded in concerns for autonomy, dignity, and democratic accountability, such a right would challenge the legitimacy of decisions that subject individuals to legal consequences on the basis of predictive correlations rather than conduct.

Bringing labour law and criminal law into dialogue, the workshop argues that both the right to refuse work and the right to freedom from algorithmic classification respond to a broader transformation in contemporary governance: the shift from governing conduct to governing prediction. Across distinct legal domains, algorithmic systems increasingly seek to manage individuals through continuous monitoring, evaluation and pre-emptive intervention. In this sense, both rights operate as mechanisms of resistance against emerging forms of automated social control, preserving spaces of autonomy, contestation and human agency within increasingly datafied regimes of power.