Five Stars Wars - European Legal Perspectives on Customer Ratings and Discrimination

Abstract

The use of customer ratings to evaluate worker performance is increasingly widespread, going beyond the gig-economy. As highlighted by computer and social sciences, this practice risks producing discriminatory outcomes, by reproducing biases existing in society. By drawing an analogy with discriminatory practices adopted to satisfy its customers’ preferences, we propose a legal analysis of this phenomenon grounded in EU non-discrimination law. We first analyse the issues related to the application of non-discrimination law to self-employed workers. Then, we address the lack of access for the individual worker to the data regarding customers’ ratings, through the lens of data protection law. We conclude by arguing that the use of customer ratings should be considered as a suspect criterion, while the current non-discrimination laws should be modernised through a clearer inclusion of self-employed workers.

Keywords: rating, labour law, data protection, privacy, discrimination