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NYC food delivery gig workers score a big minimum wage victory
- hezralig 3y agoI am unsure if this is a wage that workers receive while clocked in maneuvering to "hot zone" activity areas in order to get orders OR if it only applies when a worker has accepted an order. Browsing reddit.com/r/ubereatsdrivers and /r/ubereats has led me to believe that the majority of these workers spend their time waiting between orders and that they will not receive an order waiting in a stationary location for too long (i.e. they could be ready+willing to accept an order for hours and would be penalized if they did not actively drive or if camped out in a parking lot/home). If it is the latter case, then these workers can still receive a sub federal minimum wage if there aren't many orders placed or if the algorithm decides to prioritize one worker over another. With the new able bodied working requirements for SNAP and other benefits, I wonder if it is possible that gig workers can be engaged in work activity for 80+ hours per month while not technically meeting that requirement. That would mean they would make less than minimum wage and be cut off from healthcare and food assistance.
- Simulacra 3y agoI can't afford food delivery as it is now, I'm afraid this will just push it to skyrocketing prices and demanding tips.
- godzillabrennus 3y agoYeah, which is probably best, most of us would benefit from eating out a lot less. It’s also better to have jobs that pay living wages than jobs that don’t. That said, it sucks the government had to get involved at all.
- hezralig 3y agoAfter having an issue with an order, I investigated reddit.com/r/ubereatsdrivers and /r/ubereats to discover than many of these drivers aren't really earning more than a base rate of a couple of dollars (literally ~$2) plus whatever we leave as tips. It seems like these delivery platforms have positioned themselves in such a way that they are extracting a pound of flesh from restaurants, customers, and underpaying their workers.
- LadyCailin 3y agoIf the thing you want can only be economical by exploiting laborers, then too bad, you have to live without that thing.
- willio58 3y agoSolid point. It's like when Uber stopped subsidizing their rides as much and people started freaking out. We get complacent thinking we deserve these services with little cost, when real humans are the ones providing these services and we're essentially thinking they shouldn't make enough money to live well.
- ctoth 3y agoSee, I completely disagree with this. I am absolutely certain that the economics for these services could work if they weren't piping a majority of profits back to the bloated mothership. > A driver recently shared with me that he made $5 on a $23 ride I booked recently. If I order Doordash, the food is already way more expensive than in the restaurant. The driver gets a delivery fee. The driver gets a tip. Somehow, a $10 meal turns into $25. And there's still not enough money to pay the driver to bring me food from 5 minutes away? (I'm blind and don't have a car.) Of course there is. It's just all going to corporate. You thought Hollywood accounting was bad, wait until you learn about delivery business accounting.
- nebula8804 3y agoI don't see how you can pull enough fat out of the operation to reverse the terrible numbers that Doordash has had for years. Here is a link to their financials. They have had years of losses. [1]:https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/dash/financials/ https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/dash/financials/
- WalterBright 3y agoAnd then those workers are unemployed.
- nebula8804 3y ago
- lastofthemojito 3y agoHe said it 90 years ago but I still agree with FDR: "no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country" http://docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/odnirast.html http://docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/odnirast.html
- cde-v 3y agoAgreed. Farms should not be businesses and should be taken over by the government.
- EA-3167 3y agoBecause that's always worked out soooo well in the countries which tried that model.
- ChadNauseam 3y agoI agree. But we should make them nonexistent by giving better options to their workers. (I assume that workers would not take sub-living-wage jobs if living-wage jobs were available to them.) Making the jobs illegal without introducing a superior alternative is not the favor many people think it is.
- lumb63 3y agoConsider the contrary idea from Thomas Sowell: “ Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero, regardless of the laws, and that is the wage that many workers receive in the wake of the creation or escalation of a government-mandated minimum wage, because they lose their jobs or fail to find jobs when they enter the labor force. Making it illegal to pay less than a given amount does not make a worker’s productivity worth that amount—and, if it is not, that worker is unlikely to be employed.” How many workers would work for less than a living wage and are prevented from doing so by minimum wage laws and instead denied jobs?
- maxfurman 3y agoDesperate people with no leverage against their potential employers? There are a lot of them in this country.
- willio58 3y agoIf you can't afford food delivery I wouldn't blame the delivery workers. They make near nothing (this bumps them up to a little more than nothing for NYC). I hear a lot of complaints about food delivery prices. And I can't help but fight back a little because: 1. Food costs more. If you go to fast food or local restaurants you will see prices have risen. The cause of this is debated but it doesn't change the fact that food costs more. 2. Delivery workers work pretty hard to do what they do. Due to a lack of good American public transportation (especially outside of NYC) most delivery workers have to drive their own cars which is a cost that gets more expensive with time as cars have a limited amount of miles and tend to break down somewhat randomly with age. 3. Maybe most importantly, you don't need food delivered. Unless you're disabled, it's inherently an out-of-touch argument because there's nothing stopping you from making your own food or going to pick up food. It's a luxury, so I believe the prices aren't really that crazy if it means the workers can make livable wages. And if you're disabled, we should have better systems in place for you than saying "use doordash". - edited to account for disabled people.
- Sohcahtoa82 3y ago> Maybe most importantly, you don't need food delivered. Nobody does. People with disabilities would beg to differ. There's a reason Meals on Wheels exists.
- hezralig 3y agoYeah, I agree that there should be some sort of government subsidized program or resource rather than a privately funded company that can only exist by exploiting workers, restaurants, and customers to fulfill that need. In the United States, there are in-home healthcare workers and adjacent support workers that can perform tasks such as grocery shopping and meal preparation, no?
- alxjrvs 3y agoThere are, in the same way that there are infinity pools and private planes.
- et-al 3y agoFood delivery startups were a scam anyway. It was always performed by under-the-table workers and somehow VCs thought there's money to be made there.
- Ekaros 3y agoI always found these companies weird. Like they bloat so much to grow fast, but that bloat just kills their whole model in the end. Most people have a threshold for costs. And the head count in tech and marketing doesn't help at all with keeping it under that cost.
- asnyder 3y agoNYTimes post and discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36307496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36307496
- spywaregorilla 3y agoI feel like there's a good opportunity for labor arbitrage or whatever you want to call it. 1) Get 10 friends 2) All friends log on to deliver food from 2am to 5am. Sleep and get paid. 3) When someone actually gets an order, you, and only you, do the labor. You can adjust the logic to cover edge cases where you don't actually have enough labor to fulfill the demand. We could call it surge pricing. Uber for Uber Eats. AFAIK, unlike Uber, there's no user auth to make this hard to do for food delivery.
- vkou 3y agoPaying people who aren't doing any work is generally the cost of providing 24/7 service coverage for a business, yes. Many people hired to do night shift have very little to do for most of the night. Maybe Door dash et al shouldn't 'overhire'. They pay for it with their health, though.
- spywaregorilla 3y agoIt is not clear to me that delivery companies have the agency to deny people's ability to work, however. If you must pay people for time that they are working, but there is no work to do, then you face a challenge with many people signing up to be paid for nothing. What do you do if 100 drivers start saying they're waiting for orders and there are no orders coming in? What do you do if 100 drivers say they're waiting for orders, and a paltry number of orders come in that, unbenownst to Uber, get delegated to just 5 of those 100 while all 100 collect pay checks?
- vkou 3y agoOf course they have the agency. They can limit the # of active drivers that can log in. Nobody is forcing them to have an unlimited number of drivers, just like nobody is forcing the Best Western down the road to hire an unlimited number of people to work their night desk. It's just that under a business model where having more people on call not cost them anything, they were happy to expand the on call roster to an unlimited size.
- whywhywhydude 3y agoIf this massively increases the cost of online deliveries, won’t it reduce demand significantly? Unless they limit or freeze who can do online deliveries (like they do for uber and lyft), I am not sure if the workers will really be better off.
- Graziano_M 3y agoDemand and tips. I tip my delivery drivers because I know they aren't making $20 an hour. I won't anymore.
- renlo 3y agoIn New York City you need to leave a tip otherwise the delivery worker won't pick up the order (found this out when trying to tip in cash one time). Tips don't seem to be optional when it comes to delivery in urban areas. I've a feeling the delivery fee will increase, customers will continue to tip otherwise they won't receive their food, and overall the price of delivery will increase and the number of customers willing to foot the cost will lower.
- Graziano_M 3y agoI live in NYC, but I've always tipped. I thought that they couldn't see the tip until after. Factoring that in, I read it the same way as you. That said, I order food less than once a month simply because I find it such a rip off (already). I wonder whether Fresh Direct / grocery delivery prices will go up as well.
- lelandfe 3y agoI suspect that a. Adequate pay for the delivery person, and b. Adequate profit for both the restaurant and delivery app result in a price few would be willing to pay, yes. You can only slice this pie so many times.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Sohcahtoa82 3y agoIn the long term, one or both of the following is going to happen: 1. Delivery fees will go up. 2. Delivery companies will put strict limits on how many drivers can be online at once, crippling the narrative in their marketing that drivers can choose their own hours. The latter is especially likely if companies are required to pay drivers when they're just sitting around and waiting for an order.
- omegaworks 3y ago3. Delivery companies are forced to extract less value from the people actually doing the work. A driver recently shared with me that he made $5 on a $23 ride I booked recently. Uber's margins are absolutely mad.
- 908B64B197 3y agoIt's much better than what he would have made under the old medallion system Uber disrupted. Pre-Uber/Lyft, either the driver rented the car from a middleman who rented the medallion from a rich owner, or said owner was selling and financing (most banks won't touch these medallions!) a medallion at a ridiculous interest rate to a driver that planned to use it as his retirement savings (an extremely volatile asset and not very liquid). Sure back then the dispatch only took a 15-20% cut, but medallion payments took at least a 50% cut on every ride. That money didn't get re-invested or re-distributed as incentives to drivers, no. It went straight to the pockets of the local rent-seeker. The more I spoke to cab drivers the more it seemed their industry was a pyramid scheme aimed at helping established rent-seeker take advantage of often poor new immigrants. Uber/Lyft brought a breeze of fresh air: Someone could simply buy a car, calculate the depreciation and it's value on the market (since unlike medallions cars are relatively liquid assets!) do rideshare and calculate their profits or loss. They can get out of the game at anytime, and they know exactly how much they are going to get for the car they have should they sell it. And I'm not even touching the usual pain points and often discriminatory practices of medallion drivers (refusing card payments, refusing rides to non-white passengers and to non-white neighborhoods...).
- PreachSoup 3y ago
- NovemberWhiskey 3y agoI'll preface this by saying I expect to get downvoted all to hell, but: if these jobs are so bad and so underpaid, why are people doing them in a period of what is reported to be incredible labor market tightness?
- hezralig 3y agoPerhaps the reported data on the prosperity of the average person isn't as accurate?
- the_jesus_villa 3y agoLabor stats are not as good as they're advertised, and these jobs aren't as bad as we're told. Both sides exaggerate (while still being kinda true)
- NovemberWhiskey 3y agoIn either case, it's interesting though, right? I may be coming across as the free market zealot here, but I don't really understand why special pleading for a class of workers is the right solution here. If labor conditions are not as good as they're advertised, then isn't the expected outcome here that more people will try to find delivery jobs, resulting in more workers chasing fewer deliveries (assuming prices go up)?
- mountainofdeath 3y agoI believe none of them require proof of employment eligibility e.g. immigration papers so it's a way for those on the fringes of society to make a living. It's basically the same as why people work bad jobs for cash that is less than minimum wage. There are several layers of illegality here but nobody dares speak up.
- fnfjfk 3y agoMy perspective on this is a little different because I ride a bike in NYC and I do not order delivery food, ever. Thus, I only experienced the negative externalities of these apps on cycling in NYC, and I don't care about delivery food becoming more expensive or whatever. With the possible exception of the people that ride the new gray Citibike e-bikes, delivery riders are almost unquestionably the worst behaved "cyclists" in NYC. I put "cyclists" in quotes because half of them are just riding mopeds now. - They ride in whatever direction is most optimal, one-way streets be damned. This is called "salmoning" and it is universally loathed. - They don't even slow down for red lights half of the time. Look, I know, it's NYC, almost everyone Idaho stops or Idaho slow-rolls, there's even a proposed law to officially legalize it now, but they really take it to another level. - They have no awareness when starting, they will just fly into a bike lane without checking over their shoulder. Also includes right/lefts on red (also not legal, but everyone does it, and it's pretty much fine if you at least check), they do not check for something riding down the bike lane with the light. - Less relevant since it's summer currently, but usage of lights at night by these riders is maybe 50% at best. They also wear black a lot... so black bike, no lights, riding the wrong way in a bike lane. Fun! - The mopeds. Mopeds are unambiguously banned on bike lanes and especially on the bridge bike lanes, but it's impossible to ride over one of the East River bridges these days without being passed aggressively by a gas moped, not even an electric one (which are still banned!). I don't know if this will make them behave better. I don't see why it would, if they can still maximize profit by putting everyone else in danger.
- barbazoo 3y ago> They ride in whatever direction is most optimal, one-way streets be damned. This is called "salmoning" As someone living next to a Salmon spawning creek, this put a huge grin on my face, I love that term.
- bradleyjg 3y agoI’m not sure if it’s worse for us or you, but as a pedestrian I couldn’t agree more. Ten years ago I thought the macho, aggressive sport riders were bad but they are nothing compared to all these illegal mopeds. The NYPD should just seize every single one without a license plate (and while they are at it all the cars with paper plates and those with license plate obstructors.)
- pcurve 3y agoI blame this partly on tipping culture. I just do not understand why the tip amount is proportionate to the value of food being delivered. The fee should be set based on factors that impact LOE and time that impact delivery. That's it. Just like in the rest of the civilized countries. Want $9 happy meal delivered to your house? $5 bucks. Want $30 sushi next door to the McD? $5 bucks. I don't know why we make things so complicated.