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Consumer‐sourced rating systems are a dominant method of worker evaluation in platform‐based work. These systems facilitate the semi‐automated management of large, disaggregated workforces, and the rapid growth of service platforms—but may also represent a potential avenue for employment discrimination that negatively impacts members of legally protected groups. We analyze the Uber platform as a case study to explore how bias may creep into evaluations of drivers through consumer‐sourced rating systems, and draw on social science research to demonstrate how such bias emerges in other types of rating and evaluation systems. While companies are legally prohibited from making employment decisions based on protected characteristics of workers, their reliance on potentially biased consumer ratings to make material determinations may nonetheless lead to a disparate impact in employment outcomes. We analyze the limitations of current civil rights law to address this issue, and outline a number of operational, legal, and design‐based interventions that might assist in so doing.

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In order to increase efficiency, measure productivity, decrease risk, and generally maximize profits, many private enterprises monitor their employees. While “workplace surveillance,” a term used interchangeably with “employee monitoring” (Ball, 2010, p. 88) is an age-old practice, its contemporary methods in the United States have their roots in the transformation of the workforce in the mid-19th to early 21st centuries. When laborers began moving to cities to sell their time for wages, the focus of work and the workplace shifted from subsistence labor on farms to hourly and salaried work in the factories of the industrial revolution. Business in the United States turned into “big business;” at the end of the 19th century, as the railroads expanded their organizational reach, merchants with localized shops and market knowledge had to merge in order to remain competitive in a growing market. The mergers did not produce uniform organizational units automatically, and the modes of production and accounting within the combined company were often in disarray (Saval, 2014, p. 38). Once the production of goods and the methods of their transit exceeded the slower, human pace of labor, a control crisis emerged for employers who suddenly needed to process much more information to keep up with the industrial pace of production (Beniger, 1989, p. 169). The pressing question became: what structures and technologies can ensure efficiency and integrity in the organization of business and labor (Zureik, 2003, p. 48)? The innovations in information processing and communication technologies that developed to address this question were mainly directed at managing workers (Beniger, 1989, p. 169).

In the wake of the police shooting of Michael Brown in August 2014, as well as the subsequent protests in Ferguson, Missouri and around the country, there has been a call to mandate the use of body-worn cameras to promote accountability and transparency in police- civilian interactions. Body-worn cameras have received positive appraisal from the NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The latter has stated that their widespread use “[has] the potential to be a win-win, helping protect the public against police misconduct, and at the same time helping protect police against false accusations of abuse.” In 2013, the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) sent surveys to 500 of the 12,501 police departments in the U.S, and of the 254 who completed the survey only 63 of the departments reported using body-worn cameras. However, law enforcement agencies throughout the country are now rapidly adopting the cameras. In December 2014, President Obama proposed the Body-Worn Camera Partnership Program, which aims to invest $75 million through a 50% investment matching arrangement with states and localities to cover video storage and equipment expenses, with the goal of underwriting the costs of 50,000 body-worn cameras. The program is part of a broader three-year, $263 million initiative to strengthen community policing, and the funding plan is part of President Obama’s proposed FY2016 budget.