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Shipt’s algorithm squeezed gig workers, who fought back
- jval43 2y agoLooks like nothing happened after: > They asked for a meeting with Shipt executives, but they never got a direct response from the company. Its statements to the media were maddeningly vague, saying only that the new payment algorithm compensated workers based on the effort required for a job, and implying that workers had the upper hand because they could "choose whether or not they want to accept an order." > Did the protests and news coverage have an effect on worker conditions? We don’t know, and that’s disheartening.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- londons_explore 2y ago> choose whether or not they want to accept an order." If the app shows clearly what needs to be done (shop, order list, miles driven), and the pay the worker will earn, and asks if they want to accept, then IMO that's fine. The business can set those offers however they like, even using a random number generator if they want, and IMO it's morally fine.
- bayindirh 2y ago> and IMO it's morally fine. When it becomes immoral from your perspective?
- londons_explore 2y agoWhen they offer to pay you X for the job, but then pay you < X. Or if they get you to pay them money upfront (ie. for uniforms) on the basis of 'workers earn $Y per day', but then change the rules so some workers don't earn Y per day and don't offer a refund of the upfront payment to unhappy workers.
- rbetts 2y agoLooks like shipt/target successfully converted gig work back from a percentage of revenue (percentage of cart value) to a task based rate. Workers lose when they can't capture value proportional to the revenue generation they support, only in proportion to their hours of labor.
- lupire 2y agoIt depends on the proportions.
- robertlagrant 2y ago> Workers lose when they can't capture value proportional to the revenue generation they support, only in proportion to their hours of labor. Time-based contracts are pretty normal. I imagine most people on the planet are on them. There are exceptions - e.g. sales commissions - but to say that workers lose on the thing that most people do requires at least some elaboration.
- astrange 2y agoWhat if the revenue generation is negative? It's not worth it to profit share in every business, because some of them are unprofitable.
- NovemberWhiskey 2y agoIf workers are low-skilled, easily replaceable and practically fungible then realistically speaking why would their employer pay them based on value-added?
- Ekaros 2y agoI think reasonable thing here would also allow contractors send counter offer. Maybe 10x 100x or 1000x. Then it would be up to side ordering to accept or reject one of those.
- tux1968 2y agoAnd if the company makes it a policy to never accept any counteroffer (which is legal and fair), you're back to the same system, without that feature existing.
- Ekaros 2y agoWhy would company here care. They are just a platform. Does Ebay or Amazon care what prices their sellers set?
- vundercind 2y agoAmazon cares. Steam cares. Dunno about eBay. Platforms sometimes care—by which I mean, achieve a market position that means sellers can’t afford not to use them, then leverage that power to force lots and lots of weaker people and entities to do what they want, possibly causing higher lowest-prices in the overall market in the process, so, also hurting buyers.
- Marbling4581 2y agoWhat if there's discrimination built in to the system? Maybe a business is willing to pay white people more, or women less. They can do that while still following your framework. Is that moral?
- A4ET8a8uTh0 2y agoIs morality relevant to the equation? If it is, whose morality? And who gets to be arbiter of those morals? At least with laws, there are clear adjudicators on the issues at hand.
- cryptonym 2y agoThey can set offers however they like and you are free to not accept. If the algorithm detects that you are likely to accept for little money and short you with lower offers compared to other users, is it still morally fine?
- lupire 2y agoUnsure, but why would they do that? Why risk paying more by making a higher offer elsewhere before making a lower offer?
- error_logic 2y agoLook to two-tailed tests when a flipside doesn't make sense. Consider what risk might exist if you fear overpaying so much that you make a lowball offer yet someone feels compelled to accept. The product or service might be "done" but in a way that screws you over in the long run as well. Trust is earned, and it flows both ways.
- error_logic 2y agoThis runs into both the ideals and the limitations of the Free Market. Ideally, there's incentive for people to collectively reach the most efficient solution through aggregated laziness and greed. In practice, people only have so much bandwidth and shortcuts will be taken, options will be overlooked, and people will exploit or be exploited due to the blinders either put on willingly or forced on them--on top of our natural capacity for observing reality no matter how much information is provided.
- NovemberWhiskey 2y agoOther than the algorithmic aspect, isn't that basically exactly how the employment market works?
- smabie 2y agoSure, this is how negotiate and hiring have always worked.
- or_am_i 2y agoI am not defending Shipt and there is no doubt gig workers are in a very vulnerable position. However, the data analysis results as presented in the article do not support the article's main point. "40% are getting paid at least 10% less" is not unnatural to expect whenever pay is redistributed, especially since some 30+% are getting at least 10% more. Imagine a _hypothetical_ situation where Shipt is 100% on point and driving a fairer version of the algorithm patch removing a way for workers to "optimize" for short, well paid trips, resulting in pay cuts to those who had learnt how to do it, while not changing/increasing pay for everyone else. We would see the same kind of result: some portion of workers would get paid 10% less, some 10% more. This does show that workers are paid differently for the same work they have been doing, but does not prove the change is unfair.
- tossandthrow 2y agoYou are looking for this in the article > It wasn’t a clear case of wage theft, because 60 percent of workers were making about the same or slightly more under the new scheme. Your statement that "some 30+% are getting at least 10% more" assumes that there is no wage theft - which is not cut in stone.
- chgs 2y agoAren’t gig workers contractors? Is it wage theft if I negotiate a lower price with my local timber yard?
- p_l 2y agoMostly gray area because gig corps don't like actually treating the workers as contractors, they just like the lowered costs. Sometimes that goes afoul when it's ruled that they put requirements that are only valid for employees on contractors.
- qeternity 2y ago> Mostly gray area because gig corps don't like actually treating the workers as contractors, they just like the lowered costs. I don't follow this? Is this predicated on the fact that gig corps can choose not to work with contractors that don't meet their criteria? If so, how is this different from only using lumber yards that consistently meet your expectations?
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- moritonal 2y agoDo the worker's even see how much they'll make up front? If not, how is this fair, or even legal? I'm doubtful anyone here would go and work for McDonald's with the agreement being that they pay you what they think you're worth, after the job's done. We all see the asymmetry at play, and how it'd be abused at a moments notice.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoIANAL, but I suspect that there's US law, specifying that there needs to be a clear, transparent formula for pay. Even convoluted ones, like commissions for sales, or shared tips, are covered by law. I do know this, as I know a number of salespeople and servers. I suspect that the government needs to know what to tax, and obfuscated pay, means obfuscated taxes.
- robertlagrant 2y ago> I suspect that the government needs to know what to tax, and obfuscated pay, means obfuscated taxes. You're taxed on what you're paid. The government doesn't do a parallel calculation and tax you on that.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoBut what you don’t get paid, the company keeps, and it may come under different tax rules. My experience is that governments are quite interested in where the money goes.
- lotsofpulp 2y agoWhat you don’t get paid is not pay. That is money that leaves the employer’s account and goes into the employee’s account (or government’s account for tax withholding). I don’t see how this can be obfuscated.
- robertlagrant 2y agoYes, but how is this relevant. That is also not calculated based on a pay formula. It's reported.
- mhh__ 2y agoThis style of writing headlines really irks me
- usernamed7 2y agoI didn't have a problem with it. the style that really does irk me are ones that reveal nothing useful, like if this was titled just "fighting back"
- theptip 2y agoA clear case of adverse selection in the old pricing model. From a game-theoretic perspective in a gig marketplace you don’t want jobs that are strictly better, else sophisticated market participants (workers) will select the best ones leaving chaff - and a worse experience - for the less sophisticated participants. What you are looking for is preference optionality, eg one Uber driver might prefer not to do very long trips, another might prefer it, and you ideally get paid fairly for either. In this case as others have noted, it doesn’t actually sound like an unfair change. Perhaps communications could have been better though.
- biftek 2y agoNo, you ideally want all the jobs to be good. With the old model it was clear what the floor for getting something delivered was. Target could have instead adjusted order minimums or shrunk delivery zones instead. Gamifying peoples livelihood is the problem.
- theptip 2y ago> you ideally want all the jobs to be good That is… exactly the point I made, when I said: > you don’t want jobs that are strictly better Preference optionality is widely stated to be one of the features that gig workers like about the arrangement. The options you suggest are also valid ways of homogenizing the jobs to reduce variance. > Gamifying peoples livelihood is the problem To be clear Game Theory applies to all economic interactions. Mechanism Design is the branch of Game Theory pertaining to market design to achieve desired outcomes, such as “avoid adverse selection in my gig work marketplace”. Gamification is a specific application of video game design to economic interactions, it’s unrelated to what I’m discussing. (Examples of Gamification would be gaining experience points and levels for delivery, daily checking rewards, achievement badges, etc. - the general goal in Gamification is setting up a dopamine loop to encourage repeat use of the app. Hopefully it’s clear this is not what I was talking about.)
- mistrial9 2y agoapplied Game Theory in real human history a.k.a. wealth-building, has shown that the biggest empires with the most wealth and the best armies are built with slavery. So slavery did win, again and again and again. I don't think most modern people have any idea how deep and wide the history of slavery is .. Game-theory is fun when you get good at it for designing markets and products, but let us not lose sight of the crucial discussion.. human beings with real lives are not equal to economic parts.
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- fallingfrog 2y ago“There’s no technical reason why these algorithms need to be black boxes; the real reason is to maintain the power structure.” I’m kind of amazed that the article has the courage to say this out loud. The New York Times or any mainstream publication would never have been so honest. If anything they would have said some weasel words like “some ex-associates of shipt have complained that the app’s compensation system is unfair.” Rather than just blurt out the truth, which is that it’s unfair by design because the owners of the app want to maintain a certain power relationship. It’s the kind of thing that everyone knows but is not allowed to say in printed form.
- alias_neo 2y ago> I’m kind of amazed that the article has the courage to say this out loud. The New York Times or any mainstream publication would never have been so honest. It's the IEEE, (we) Engineers are known for having an aversion to bullshit, and just for straight-up having no filter. I wish more of the world worked that way.
- bithead 2y ago>Those deliveries were made by Shipt workers, who shopped for the items and drove them to customers’ doorsteps. I've seen Shipt's operations internally, and they don't go shopping for stuff at stores and then deliver them, unless that's a different part of the business.
- siliconc0w 2y agoWow, gig or not, workers should be paid transparently. Which should be obvious but this is kind of the problem with enshittification where once a business feels they have a bit of a moat (like with a two sided marketplace) they will erode the service to take every advantage unless stopped by regulation. No one likes regulation because it's effectively crufty technical debt and our political system is far too slow, corrupt, or incompetent to effectively refactor it so the best we can do is either nothing and endure the enshittification or layer on more cruft, usually far after the fact multiple years and court fights later.
- jtriangle 2y ago>60 percent of workers were making about the same or slightly more under the new scheme. But we felt that it was important to shine a light on those 40 percent of workers Absolutely pathetic investigative journalism on display. This is a hit piece thinly veiled under the guise of being pro worker that fails to support the main point of algorithmic management of gig workers is worse for everyone but the corporation employing it. If anything, they proved that shipt's algo did exactly what it was designed and reported to do, make payments more fair.
- cbsmith 2y ago> If anything, they proved that shipt's algo did exactly what it was designed and reported to do, make payments more fair. They didn't prove that. It's entirely possible the algo was skimming something off the top. It's entirely possible the algo was disproportionately rewarding some people to the detriment of others. A lot of it depends on what one thinks is "fair"... and without transparency, we can't even judge whether it is or not... which itself could be argued is unfair.
- strictnein 2y agoReally surprising coming from an org like IEEE. One expected the data to show a significantly detrimental effect, but it looks like it was slightly positive overall, at least based on the data they're displaying.
- alwa 2y agoIf the whole point of the algo change is to correct an unfairness by which a strict fee+cart value approach doesn’t reliably reflect the amount of work somebody’s being asked to do, isn’t this exactly the outcome we expect? That the people who were putting more work in now get more money, while the people who were benefiting from sniffing out the “easy” jobs now make something more in line with everybody else’s compensation? It does seem unsporting on the company’s part to play coy about the details. I wonder what the imperative was there: to avoid squabbling with workers about what “effort” means? To reduce the chances of legal scrutiny in one of the thousands of jurisdictions they operate in? To preserve the flexibility to quietly turn the dial in their own favor in the future? I’m reminded of how Uber caught flak over surge pricing, and ultimately dealt with that by making pricing completely opaque. Now they still might say “prices are a little higher because of the weather” if they decide to, but normally you don’t even expect to know whether your price for a given ride is based on their estimate of your desperation, their having sized you up as price-insensitive, driver supply, or what…
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y agoApart from the workers and the company there is another important actor here - the clients. I think the point of the algo change was to better serve clients with smaller orders.
- croemer 2y ago> The system used optical character recognition—the same technology that lets you search for a word in a PDF file That's not correct, at least for "digitally-born PDFs" that were made on a computer and haven't been scanned. In that case, the PDF can be parsed directly, without OCR, to get text. That's what a tool like PyPDF2 does, for example.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y agoThere is an inherent flaw in those algos - they can be played by bots that scan for the best orders, while workers without bots and customers with smaller orders are left hanging. Better to just pay by the hour - you agree to deliver any order thrown at you during your shift.
- NovemberWhiskey 2y agoBut then you'd be an employee, rather than an independent contractor; and that would break the business model. No value judgment there, just facts.
- sweeter 2y agoThe "Gig Economy" is a literal cancer to society and I genuinely hope the upper management get everything that they deserve and then some.
- hatenberg 2y agoAlgorithms don’t squeeze people. People do.
- jmartin2683 2y agoWhen you read the article and realize that they’re actually complaining about a raise.
- jmartin2683 2y agoWent looking for a reason to be angry, didn’t find one (quite the opposite!) but meh… just protest anyway lol