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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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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.