Wes Damen

Abstract The rise of surveillance, automation and algorithmic management poses new challenges for worker protection. This article examines ways in which data protection law can reinforce labour law in addressing these challenges. Using the botanical metaphor of 'grafting', it proposes integrating labouw law expertise into the GDPR's open-ended legal framework, combining the strengths of both legal fields. The analysis focuses on three areas: lawful processing, data-subject rights, and purpose limitation. It shows how labour-law expertise can sharpen concepts such as consent, contractual necessity, legitimate interests and proportionality, and how collective institutions can strengthen individual GDPR rights. This approach offers a framework for adapting worker protection to increasingly data-driven forms of management at work.

Abstract This article argues that the Dutch childcare benefits scandal should be understood as part of a broader international pattern of failures in digital welfare states. Similar failures in digital welfare systems have occurred internationally, revealing recurring combinations of increasingly conditional and punitive social security administration, algorithmic harms, and weak accountability mechanisms. By examining foreign scandals and subsequent reforms, the article identifies lessons for the digital welfare state in three areas: safeguarding humane treatment of citizens, governing and scrutinising automated decision-making, and strengthening rule-of-law checks and balances. The contribution argues that international comparison is necessary to help identify structural risks and harmful patterns and to build more resilient safeguards against future injustices.

Abstract This article examines how European data protection law, particularly the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), can facilitate welfare-state dystopias. Drawing on welfare scandals, including Robodebt, SyRI and the Dutch Childcare Benefit scandal, this article analyses how the GDPR's legal architecture and its deference to national or sectoral legislation can weaken safeguards in social security. The result hereof is that high-risk data processing activities in the context of social security remain insufficiently constrained. It examines three core principles—lawfulness, data-subject rights and purpose limitation—and shows how their current application may enable data-driven injustice. The article develops four reforms aimed at recalibrating GDPR doctrine: stronger protection against automated decision-making, enhanced proportionality scrutiny, tighter limits on purpose limitation exceptions, and protection for the essence of fundamental rights.

Abstract As artificial intelligence becomes embedded in workplace organisation and management, attention is needed to its effects on workers' rights, working conditions, and its effects on the (remaining) quality of work. This article argues that workers' representative bodies have an important role to play in ensuring that new technologies are introduced responsibly and analyses the legal avenues for workers' representative bodies to influence said implementation. It finds that the EU Artificial Intelligence Act provides relatively few direct tools for worker participation, while Dutch labour law offers more substantial opportunities through the Works Councils Act and the Working Conditions Act. The contribution argues that these existing legal mechanisms can help steer technological change, provided that risk assessment obligations under occupational safety law and the AI Act are further elaborated.

Abstract It is broadly recognized that the Dutch disability benefits system has become too complex and difficult to operate effectively. Improved data sharing between the various institutional actors involved is frequently presented as a promising solution. Such data exchanges, however, are governed by a fragmented legal framework in which different parties are subject to fundamentally different statutory regimes. The contribution examines the Gordian knot at the intersection of the Dutch Civil Code, its Work and Income Act, its Social Security Exchange Act and the GDPR. By clarifying how these frameworks overlap and how they facilitate or constrain data sharing, the article explores the scope for more effective and lawful data exchange in the Dutch disability benefits system.