Court Rulling
Dismantling the Fissured Workplace: A Long Process to Crack the Code
02.06.26
AI and the Platform Economy
How AI and the Platform Economy are reshaping the world of work
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and digital labour platforms are transforming the world of work at an unprecedented pace. If managed well, AI can increase productivity, improve the quality of work, strengthen public services, and support sustainable economic growth. The challenge is to ensure that these gains are broadly shared through effective public policy, social dialogue, and collective bargaining. These technologies have the potential to increase productivity, improve job quality, strengthen public services, and create new economic opportunities. Whether these benefits are broadly shared depends on public policy, labour market institutions, and effective social dialogue. The objective is not to slow technological change, but to shape it in ways that benefit workers, employers, and society alike.
Emerging risks
At the same time, digital technologies are reshaping employment relationships through task automation, platform work, and algorithmic management. Without appropriate regulation and collective bargaining, these developments may weaken labour protections, increase labour market fragmentation, and widen existing inequalities.
At the heart of this transformation is the rise of algorithmic management, where automated systems increasingly allocate tasks, evaluate performance, calculate dynamic pay, and monitor worker activity without direct human oversight. In Israel and overseas, this creates severe risks.
One of the most pressing concerns is the expansion of workplace surveillance. Advanced monitoring systems can track workers’ activities, communications, productivity, and even behavioural patterns at a scale previously impossible, potentially undermining privacy and autonomy at work. At the same time, employers are increasingly exploring AI tools to support decisions related to recruitment, performance evaluation, promotion, scheduling, and workforce management.
The employers’ reliance on AI tools for these daily tasks introduces algorithmic biases that may reintroduce discrimination against women, older workers, minorities, and people with disabilities. Furthermore, rather than reducing workloads, AI-driven pacing and constant connectivity often intensify work, driving stress and burnout.
Fissured employment
Because platform models and remote AI workflows physically isolate workers, traditional collective action and union organising face unprecedented challenges. These developments are not confined to mobile applications; they heavily permeate traditional industries through the expansion of “fissured employment.” This concept describes how companies shed direct responsibility for their workforce by routing labour through third parties. By inserting app interfaces and intermediary legal structures between the employer and the worker, platform companies accelerate this fracture, severing the traditional employment relationship and distancing lead firms from core legal obligations regarding safety, minimum wage, social security, and pension entitlement.
Protecting rights in the digital age
The Histadrut remains actively engaged in ensuring that structural exploitation cannot hide behind modern digital interfaces, and that technological innovation goes hand in hand with strong labour protections, fair competition, and effective collective bargaining. The labour movement in Israel will not allow hard-won workers’ rights to vanish in the digital age.
It is important to note that for the Histadrut, responsible AI adoption is not about resisting innovation. It is about translating the improved productivity into higher wages, better conditions, and worker-centred reskilling. These benefits will not emerge automatically. Collective bargaining remains the most effective tool for governing the use of AI in the workplace. It can provide the flexibility needed to address a myriad of rapidly evolving concerns unique to each workplace. Of course, under a general legal framework. To ensure a human-centred digital transition, five core issues require rethinking and addressing: the “human-in-command” principle denying critical firing or disciplinary action that is purely automated; algorithmic transparency and data privacy; the legal employment status; collective bargaining in the age of AI; and worker-centred reskilling programs that ensure a just transition.
AI policy should therefore combine innovation with worker protection, ensuring that productivity gains support better jobs, stronger public services, and inclusive economic growth.
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Key divisions and unions leading our work on the digital transition
The internal bodies driving our strategic agenda on platform labour, data rights, and digital workplace governance.
Economic and Policy Division
Provides economic analyses, policy planning, and research that guide the Histadrut’s positions and agendas. It acts as an economic advisory body to the Histadrut leadership, trade unions, and local worker committees on all matters relating to intersectoral issues, sectoral bargaining and factory-level collective bargaining.
The Legal Bureau of the Trade Union Division
The Legal Bureau launched two class actions that are still in process. In the digital platform economy, it led a landmark class-action lawsuit against Wolt to legally reclassify ~10,000 couriers from independent contractors to employees. To combat fissured employment models, it petitioned the Labour Courts to compel the corporate parent company, Super-Pharm, to negotiate a collective agreement for workers across 290 branches rather than hiding behind franchisee “partners.” After the National Labour Court ruled that Super-Pharm was not obligated to bargain, even though it had established that indirect employers can be legally bound under certain conditions, the Histadrut appealed to the High Court of Justice to prevent corporations from using franchise models to undermine the constitutional right to organise. In the digital platform economy, the union actively supported a landmark class-action lawsuit against Wolt to reclassify ~10,000 couriers from independent contractors to employees legally.
Union of Cellular, Internet and High-Tech
The sector is experiencing accelerated restructuring and layoffs, largely due to the rapid evolution and adaptation of AI tools. To protect workers, the union negotiates specific clauses to promote worker retention, such as upskilling and reskilling programs that provide workers the opportunity to acquire the technical capabilities needed to adapt to evolving company demands.
Notably, in 2026, the union undertook a fierce action against SAP’s management when it attempted to unilaterally cancel existing collective agreements to push through a “productivity plan” involving massive workforce reductions. In response, the union mounted a dual legal campaign, appealing to the Ministry of Labour to declare the cancellation unlawful and filing a formal complaint with the OECD for a breach of international good-faith bargaining standards. It ultimately forced SAP back to the table, culminating in a newly signed (July 2026) collective agreement that safeguarded prior agreements and union representation and improved severance packages for those willing to retire or quit.
The image depicts SAP workers protesting against the company’s announcement of the cancellation of collective agreements.
The Freelancers and Self-Employed Forum
The forum addresses the unique vulnerabilities of independent workers, gig contractors, and small business owners who lack traditional employee safety nets.
A major sector represented by the forum is taxi drivers, whom the Histadrut organises to challenge high platform commission fees from apps like Gett and to demand fair, inflation-adjusted meter rates from government regulators. Furthermore, the forum leads the battle against legislative efforts to introduce deregulated ride-sharing services like Uber into Israel, warning that unmonitored private drivers undermine passenger safety standards, exacerbate traffic congestion, and destroy the livelihoods of professional driver communities.
UCAPSE
The Union of Clerical, Administration & Public Service Employees (UCAPSE) represents hundreds of thousands of public-sector municipal and administrative personnel across Israel, as well as private-sector workers in trade, banking, insurance, and other sectors. Similar to the High-Tech and cellular sectors, the banking and insurance sectors are beginning to see restructuring and layoffs that stem from the rapid evolution and adaptation of AI tools.
The union is also focusing on upskilling and reskilling programs as pathways to strengthen worker retention amid evolving company demands.
Arlozorov Forum
Serving as the Histadrut’s socio-economic research institute, the Arlozorov Forum provides the empirical foundation for trade union policy on artificial intelligence and the platform economy. By evaluating global regulatory models against local market gaps, the Forum formulates actionable policy frameworks, such as the “human-in-command” principle, algorithmic transparency, and digital infrastructure in socio-economic peripheries, ensuring that technological integration in Israel reduces inequality and protects worker rights rather than deepening vulnerability.