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DoorDash, UberEats, and Grubhub sue New York City over a new $18 an hour minimum wage for delivery driver
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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I’m struggling to understand how increased pay is bad for the workers, can anyone explain that to me?
Well, you see, the CEO really wants another mega-yacht. So obviously, decreasing profits by actually paying their workers a reasonable wage is bad, it'll delay the purchase of the yacht by days. Multiple days even!
There is no reason that isn't some hideous abomination of distorted logic.
From the article, a few drivers were concerned that mandating benefits and hourly wages would require the companies to implement work scheduling and eliminate the driver's time and commitment flexibility. This is the consequence DoorDash is also implicitly threatening.
Which, is... a valid concern from the perspective that companies will always do what is in their best interest rather than employee interests. But wages and benefits have no actual dependency on scheduling even if it's a common implementation. So they're basically just scared of any change which might affect their current precarious income, understandably. And DoorDash are obviously financially short-sightedly invested in drivers staying scared and exploitable.
This is only loosely true. If companies must pay a stable hourly wage, then they're going to want stable continuous labor for that. As of now, drivers are paid for each job, which creates a lot of flexibility for both parties. If that becomes illegal, Uber Eats etc. isn't going to want to pay people to sit around in between jobs. It also allows them to explicity direct a driver to do a certain job rather than offer a job to a driver.
It's fundamentally a pretty different dynamic. Some people might find it preferable, others won't. There's some nuance here
I don't consider what a company wants to be a true dependency. It's a strong and valid desire to prevent unnecessary financial loss, but it's not a requirement with only one possible solution.
If gig SaaS companies are innovative enough to come up with a way to allow remote commitment flexibility in the first place, they're creative enough to come up with ways of preventing drivers abusing that system without scheduling them in fixed time blocks in this day and age. Threatening a schedule is just the easy way out and a scary enough threat to drivers to get them to side with DoorDash.
I guess ultimately, it's a question of why they would bother to put in time, effort, and money into developing procedures that offer them no real benefit.
Ideally, I'd rather see the development of a formalized gig worker legal status, but that would require the government to be capable of thought.
From reading only the article and none of its cited sources: the change requires a $.50/minute increase while the driver is in the middle of a gig, or $17.96 (which is the rounded $18 in the headline). Assuming the driver is literally doing a job every minute (i.e. no gaps in-between deliveries), then that’s a $30 for an entire hour. So the cost-effective alternative is to have the employee on an hourly wage and just pay them $18/hr for x hours that they’re scheduled for. The quotes in the article explained how the switching from a per-job model to a “do as many jobs in the hours we schedule you for” means they’ll lose the benefit of flexible work schedules.
That said, I think the economy will speak for itself. Given the number of times I see companies complain in the media about “nobody wants to work”, they’ll need to pony up the money in order to maintain their share in the market.
That doesn’t make sense at all…it’s an $18/hr minimum, not maximum. They can still pay them more than that if they do more deliveries.
With the per-delivery model, the drivers have the option to pick and choose which jobs to accept.
Being speculative, I believe the scare tactic being used is: the driver can be assigned very unattractive deliveries without the power to refuse. As someone that does not do deliveries for any of these companies and periodically viewed posts from /r/doordash, I can only guess that this will hurt a smaller percentage of drivers that formulate a metagame to maximize their delivery income.
Just because they can, doesn't mean they will... They won't.
I guess some are worried that whatever extra is given to them officially may be clawed back from them in some other way, unofficially.