AINEWS
A worker led charity co founded with St Andrews and Edinburgh wants the delivery apps to show how their pay algorithms work, as UK and Dutch drivers filed a class action against Uber this week.
Edinburgh delivery rider David stands in Bristo Square with his insulated bag over one shoulder and does the math. Four years ago, the same hours on the road paid his rent. Today, "I am making half the money I was making four years ago, for the same amount of hours," he told the Guardian. The fee per delivery has dropped, the offers keep arriving, and the software that decides what he gets paid for each one is a black box the platforms will not open.
He is not alone. A group of Edinburgh riders, working with researchers at the Universities of St Andrews and Edinburgh, has just secured a decade of research funding to do what the platforms will not: audit the AI that sets their pay. The group, called the Workers' Observatory, is a worker-led charity co-founded with the two universities. Its director, Cailean Gallagher, is a lecturer at St Andrews. The new funding gives the organisation a runway long enough to study the algorithms Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat use to allocate work and set fees, the same software UK delivery riders say has been cutting their pay for years without explanation.
"Algorithmic management" is the term the platforms use for that software. In practice it means the app decides which orders to send a rider, when, and for how much, with no explanation of the price. "Dynamic pricing" is one piece of it: Uber introduced it in the UK in 2023, and two academic studies, one from the University of Oxford and one from Columbia Business School, found that drivers earned "substantially less" per hour after the change. Riders say the same pattern is now hitting food delivery.
Xabier Villares, who has delivered food in Edinburgh for three years, called the drop in pay and conditions "dramatic" and said he used to be able to pay his rent and bills from a week's deliveries. He can no longer. Dylan's own records, kept in a spreadsheet because no one else will keep them for him, show what that looks like in numbers. Over the last three years his orders per hour have stayed flat, between 3.6 and 3.8. The fee per order has not: £3.67 in 2023, £3.63 in 2024, £3.51 in 2025, £3.42 in the first half of 2026 (about $4.70 to $4.50 at then-prevailing rates). The trend is his alone, one rider and one notebook, but it points the same way as the academic finding.
The platforms deny the pay is being driven down by their software. Deliveroo, which was bought by DoorDash in 2025, points to a 3.8% rise in its minimum hourly fee this year, a partnership with the GMB union, and a human-review process for "significant" account decisions. Its pay algorithm is called Frank; the company describes it as machine-learning-based. Uber says its system balances time and distance for drivers, and denies that it sets a different price for different drivers for the same trip. Just Eat says human dispatchers oversee its matching system.
The workers' organising has moved from the spreadsheet to the courtroom. On 2 September, UK and Dutch drivers filed a class action in Amsterdam against Uber over its pay and allocation algorithm, potentially worth billions. The filing alleges per-driver price adjustment; Uber denies it. The trade union movement is moving on a second front: the TUC is campaigning to ban dynamic pricing outright, the same mechanism the Oxford and Columbia researchers say has compressed driver earnings.
In Edinburgh, riders describe what the opaque system feels like in practice. Dylan, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym, has run a small test of the algorithm by logging in twice at once and rejecting low-fee offers. He says he was deactivated shortly afterwards, allegedly without cause. The platforms deny that rejecting offers leads to deactivation. Another rider, Graeme Frances, says a facial-recognition login check blocked him in August 2025 after he turned up with a black eye that was not work-related. Deliveroo attributes the failure to a blurry image and says a manual review would have cleared him to work.
What the Workers' Observatory wants is not sympathy. It wants the same thing the Amsterdam filing and the TUC ban ask for in different ways: a transparent account of the software that decides a rider's wage. The funding announced this week means riders in Edinburgh will be running that audit themselves, alongside the universities, for the next ten years. The platforms say the algorithm is fair. The riders say show your work.