Dual governance and digital labor control: Algorithmic exploitation and structural alienation in Croatia's gig economy

This article introduces the concept of dual governance labor control to explain how algorithmic management and third-party intermediaries jointly deepen precarity in platform capitalism. Drawing on Labor Process Theory and cyberpsychology, the analysis examines Croatia’s food delivery sector as a diagnostic case of how digital infrastructures restructure power, fragment accountability, and intensify alienation. Based on surveys, focus groups, and interviews with delivery workers and union leaders, the study shows how opaque algorithms produce psychological strain and decision fatigue, while aggregators displace responsibility, racialise labour hierarchies, and undermine collective organisation. These dynamics reveal how class, migration, and digital control intersect to maximize surplus extraction while eroding workers’ agency. In highlighting the structural and affective dimensions of this regime, the article extends labour process theory and situates algorithmic anxiety as a systemic outcome of capitalist governance. It concludes by outlining regulatory and collective strategies to contest dual governance and advance more democratic, transparent, and worker-centred alternatives in the platform economy.