Good, 931 words, within range. Here's the final article.

What's documented and what's disputed

David has been delivering food by bike in Edinburgh for seven years. He says he's making half of what he made four years ago, for the same hours, delivering roughly the same number of orders. He can't tell you why. Neither can the riders standing next to him in Bristo Square, waiting to peel off toward the dinner rush. That's the actual story here. Not that pay fell. That nobody moving the food has any idea which dial got turned.

Riders working for Deliveroo, Uber Eats, and Just Eat, the three platforms that run food delivery in the UK and Ireland, are asking those companies to open up the algorithm that decides what jobs they're offered and what those jobs pay. They're doing it with help from the Workers' Observatory, a charity founded by gig workers alongside academics at St Andrews and Edinburgh universities. The Observatory just secured research funding that runs for the next decade. Its job, per director Cailean Gallagher, is to get "on the ground floor" of understanding an apparatus that platforms have never had to explain to the people working inside it.

Documented, with named sources:

• David and rider Xabier Villares both describe years of declining pay for stable or similar workload, in on-the-record interviews with the Guardian.
• Villares now leads organizing for the Workers' Observatory and says the change accelerated "in the last three years."
• Research from the University of Oxford and Columbia Business School found that Uber's 2023 rollout of a dynamic-pricing algorithm left drivers earning "substantially less" per hour.
• This week, drivers in the UK and Netherlands filed a class action against Uber in an Amsterdam court, alleging its AI-powered pay-and-dispatch system breaches data protection law and depresses earnings based on what each driver will individually accept.
• Uber denies setting trip prices based on an individual driver's behavior and attributes pay discrepancies to other system features, including GPS.

Disputed, or at least unproven at the scale claimed:

• Whether dynamic pricing specifically, as opposed to more riders competing for the same orders, inflation, or platforms simply cutting base rates, is what's driving the pay decline food riders describe.
• Whether the algorithm profiles individual workers the way the Amsterdam lawsuit alleges, or whether Uber's GPS-and-routing explanation holds up under the kind of audit nobody outside the company has been allowed to run.
• The scale of the effect specifically in food delivery. The one hard number in this story, "substantially less" per hour, comes from Oxford and Columbia's study of Uber's ride-hailing drivers. Nobody has published the equivalent study for Deliveroo, Uber Eats, or Just Eat riders yet. That's the actual gap the Workers' Observatory exists to fill.

Timeline

• 2023 — Uber introduces the dynamic-pricing algorithm later studied by Oxford and Columbia researchers.
• Past three years — Workers' Observatory riders in Edinburgh track their own pay and describe a "dramatic change," per Villares.
• Recent — Workers' Observatory secures a decade of research funding to formally study the pay-setting algorithms.
• This week — Drivers from the UK, Netherlands, and other countries file a class action in Amsterdam against Uber over its AI dispatch and pricing system; the case could run into billions of dollars.
• September 5, 2026 — The Guardian publishes rider accounts from Edinburgh alongside this broader context.

For builders

• If you're building any marketplace, gig, or labor-matching product with automated pay or dispatch decisions, assume GDPR Article 22 already gives EU and UK workers a right to an explanation for automated decisions that significantly affect them. Build the audit log now, not when someone requests it.
• The EU's Platform Work Directive (2024/2831) requires member states to transpose algorithmic-transparency rules for platform workers by December 2, 2026. If your product operates in the EU, that's a compliance deadline, not a suggestion.
• The UK isn't covered by that directive post-Brexit, which is exactly why Edinburgh riders are building their own research infrastructure instead of waiting on a regulator. Don't assume the absence of a specific UK law means the absence of scrutiny.
• If you maintain any dynamic-pricing system, log the individual-level inputs separately from the aggregate ones now. Being able to prove what your algorithm did NOT use is about to become as valuable as what it did use.

Further reading

• The Guardian — Food delivery riders call on platforms to open up AI 'black box' they say has cut pay