Do we really need an article to say that the people who pay a company have more influence than the people the company pays. This is pretty much always going to be true in unspecilized labor.
Also, if their new system still has something like the "call option" to guarantee minimums it still seems like it's in everyone's best interest to not tip and get DoorDash paying as much as possible.
It's true for unorganized labor. Organizing has been a powerful tool for people who are "unspecialized" (i.e. easily replaced). If the workers agree to support each other, they have the power to stop work. But it only works if they all agree to it. That's where the organization comes in.
It helps when government regulations exist to reduce employers' ability to find replacements. That's the fundamental conflict that employers can exploit: when they can appeal to each individual to work at cost to the advancement of the entire set of workers, the organization fails. Employers can then reduce pay and worsen working conditions to the poverty level.
A variety of things have reduced the effectiveness of labor organizers over the past few decades, but they were responsible for things like the 5-day, 40-hour workweek and safety regulations. The ability of the Internet to reach out to an even wider set of unskilled workers makes the job nearly impossible.
>if their new system still has something like the "call option" to guarantee minimums it still seems like it's in everyone's best interest to not tip and get DoorDash paying as much as possible.
DoorDash being scammy doesn't give the customer permission to ignore a social norm. The customer should still tip, just do it in cash outside of the app. It is a little less convenient, but it is better to be inconvenienced than to be an asshole.
Sure it does! Let's go back to DD's old system where people are blissfully unaware that tips go straight to DD's bottom line and none of the money goes to your driver.
All you see as a Dasher is that there is a new delivery for a 'guaranteed minimum' of $10 which in this world means that you will almost never receive anything other than $10. You take the job, deliver the food, and find out after that $3 of that was tip. You take another $10 job and find out that $0 of that was tip.
In this world there is zero expectation of a tip because almost no one tips outside the app and in-app tips are worthless. The reason tipping is expected is because ...it's expected. You're an asshole at a restaurant if you don't tip because ~15% is the baseline, in DD's world the baseline is 0%.
I'm not exactly sure why you're trying to guilt yourself into paying more for the exact same service to a person that is not expecting anything extra. You're doing the equivalent of tipping the cashier at the grocery store.
You are basing your argument around just doing the minimum. Lots of people want to tip more than whatever you, society, or DoorDash decides it the minimum. Beyond simply being misleading, DoorDash's old model made it extremely difficult for anyone to reward their delivery person with an above average tip.
In many places Papa John's gets away with illegally taking tips away from delivery drivers. KenM is actually smart because by not tipping he forces PJ's to make up the missing wage if the driver doesn't hit minimum wage.
Oh! But PJ's screws that over by trying to call the employee an independent contractor. Oh yea, they try the same crap as Uber and Lyft and the other rideshare and delivery companies. In fact, they're practically the modern pioneers of the new 'independent contractor' scam. these 'tech companies' are just copying what the pizza industry has been doing for ages.
> This is pretty much always going to be true in unspecilized labor.
Not when regulation steps in. That is what labor law and regulation is for.
The "gig economy" was a tech industry attempt to sidestep labor law, and the law is finally catching up. And mind you, you don't have to outlaw how gig workers are currently treated as contractors everywhere to break these platforms; just in places large enough that without those markets, the platform is no longer barely sustainable (for example, 25% of Uber's bookings occur in just five cities: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, and São Paulo). It doesn't matter much for platforms if gig workers are still legal in say, Wyoming.
> It doesn't matter much for platforms if gig workers are still legal in say, Wyoming.
Why not? While brand recognition is valuable, it makes sense to operate in any jurisdiction in which you operate at a profit. At this point, all of the infrastructure to build the platform in the first place is a sunk cost, though if their total operating volume falls dramatically there maybe some work involved in turning down excess capacity to reduce ongoing costs.
You'll have no disagreement from me but I'm not sure I would say that collective government action is a form of worker influence but rather broader societal influence.
Seems obvious to me. Most companies will take the most unreasonable customer complaint and ask how they can fix the customer's boo boo, with a smile.
Meanwhile, a reasonable complaint from staff could be seen as an uprising of the working class.
You can also think of it this way: when 15% of your staff leave, you at least don't have to pay them. You get a 100% discount on 15% of your old headcount. Maybe you take some of those savings to bribe other staff to pick up the slack before the replacements come in.
If 15% of your customers leave, that's just money gone and you're stuck holding the bag on everything from inventory to leases, to salaries, and your own idle time.
I’ve become somewhat fascinated by consumer activism and think there’s a missing opportunity to build something like change.org specifically to boycott specific companies, products, etc to pressure change.
Edit: should throw in I actually submitted this idea for Startup School and in the early MVP ideation/building phase.
One of the projects i've daydreamed about is an app where you sign up for issues that you care about like water privitization or palm oil etc, and then you scan a barcode and get a report of whether the product is connected to any of those problems. You will then (hopefully) not buy the product and maybe hit a button in the app saying that you chose not to buy it.
Every month, the app collects the data from its users and produces a report:
"Dear Nestle, this month you lost $X of revenue on account of people boycotting you because of this or that."
I think it's important to send some kind of negative feedback to companies.
I love this idea. I've noticed that as corps get larger and operate more and more brands under fewer umbrellas boycotts are becoming a lot less effective. Most efforts probably don't even land on the radar, let alone have a noticeable impact on the bottom line. Finding ways to deliver more consumer feedback up the chain that aren't mediated by the company's own processes seems essential going forward.
I'm interested in how you can combat bias in the product. Today we're plagued with the problem that our news sources are frequently working from a narrative, which I presume your product would source information from.
It's a no-brainer that customers have all the power.
If there are no customers there is no business. It doesn't matter how many 'angel investors' you have in a business or other nonsense like that. If producers try to jack up prices and nobody feels like paying them then it's the producers that go bankrupt, not the customers. Similarly if producers piss of their customers so they leave then it's the producers that lose jobs, not the customers.
This is the democratizing effect of capitalism. Everybody works for a living and everybody is somebody's customer. In a total capitalist society you must serve to be able to eat and when you eat must be served.
Of course the world is not a perfect place and there are a multitude of ways that this power dynamic gets turned on it's head.
One of the ways is people being convinced that they are passive "consumers" who believe they are helpless to 'capitalists' and apathetically volunteer themselves to be victims... Like people who go out and put 600 dollars on their credit cards on a new smart phone only to complain and moan on that smart phone on how they are being spied on and so on and so forth... while all the while paying interest to the bank for joy of financing their own privacy violation.
Media has been rightly under fire these past few years, but stories like this and the recent re-hashing of the Epstein case go to show the power of the fourth estate.
Reading that Door Dash article was like reading The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, which exposed the realities of working in the meat packing plants in Chicago at the turn of the century and led to reforms. Tech only makes it easier to abuse low end labor, its good to see that muckraking is still a viable form of journalism.
Does anyone actually know if this benefits workers? Given how little most people seem to tip it seems that doordash delivery drivers were likely making more on average with the model they just moved away from. It is more of a redistribution of tips across workers. I also didn't hear much complaint about this from employees but from customers instead and I regularly visit the gig economy subreddits for workers to see what their complaints are.
IIRC, it's true that when restaurants shift to a tipless system that (a) charges the true price up front and (b) distributes the revenue more evenly to both front of house and back of house, servers end up making less.
It seemed to be the most straightforward thing to do is to charge the customer the "guaranteed minimum" that they're promising to pay the delivery person, then add tip on top. The higher sticker price would probably drop demand, but the people who do deliver would earn more on average. It's also possible, though, that people will simply stop tipping, leading to a small drop in average revenue per delivery.
I wish we got rid of tipping for these situations altogether, but I realize it's useful as a price discrimination mechanism.
Yes if you read /r/doordash there seems to some workers lamenting that they will expect the pay to go down because of this. If you live in a area where tips are not much it might be worse of.
Delivery should be paid for by the company at a known price. Tips should go to the delivery person. Their model was basically giving the tips to the company, which is not what a customer wants. If I knew my tip was just going to the company I wouldn't give one.
Unfortunately stuff like this happens at many local restaurants. The jobs are allowed to pay below minimum wage and let the tips pay the employee. Some places abuse that even further.
I'm wondering this as well, I think this is a case of Hanlon's razor, and I hope that in the name of perceived fairness the workers don't end up getting screwed.
The bad press from NYT kind of forced their hand here: why would anyone keep tipping on DoorDash once word is out that it's not a tip, it's a donation to DoorDash Inc.? And if people stop tipping once they know their tips don't matter, it leaves DoorDash more on the hook for guaranteed delivery fees.
So, glad they are doing the right thing I guess, but I'm not giving them any points for waiting until they had no other option.
Now armed robbery is bad, no doubt. If I had heard of this fellow getting 17 months in prison for it I probably wouldn't have thought twice. But 17 years is ridiculous, even if he will be out in 8 with good behavior. Meanwhile examples like Doordash show it's basically legal to steal from poor people, and Bernie Madoff, who stole $20 billion dollars is petitioning for clemency because he's old and what the hell, it was just money.
Man, legally doing some scummy things with paperwork is one thing. Maybe they should take the money back.
But violent crime is another thing entirely. The payoff matrix is totally different and hinges on the neutralization effect. And the damage done by the crime can't be reversed, unlike pure monetary losses. You can pay back stolen wages. You can't un-kill a murder victim or un-rape a woman.
Anyone who's ready to point a gun at people and engage a dangerous police chase needs to be of the street for a while. Ideally, until he ages enough for his hormone balance to calm him down a notch.
Also note that this dude likely has a record already. If that's the case, letting him out basically means signing up not innocent citizens to be terrorized and possibly killed in his inevitable future crimes. Perhaps you're okay with that risk of you think you won't be the one getting shot. If you knew you would be his next victim, you'd be asking for more than 17 years.
I was shocked when I realized why the US comparatively tips so well, is because it's entirely likely you're contributing more to your server's income, than the restaurant you've just bought the meal from.
This is only going to grow more extreme in the years to come. We finally have a generation in this country that actually gives a shit. DoorDash didn't invent bad labor practices. They weren't even part of the first thousand companies to bilk workers out of tips. But now we have a critical mass of people who notice and care and are even willing to act (or at least be outspoken). The apathetic and irrational reign of the boomers is finally, finally coming to an end.
I hope you are correct, and I hope we are reaching the critical point of old people die and young people coming of voting age that we can elect some politicians that care about the voters and not the donors.
They say politics is like a pendulum and it seems like we are all the way on the right and it should start going back to the left any day now.
I'll just say, "I hope you old people die soon, please die faster" (paraphrase) is quite a hateful thing to say. Especially since roughly half those older people you want to die actually agree with your preferred policies.
Maybe it would have been better to say, the younger generation needs to be better represented by politicians as they are the ones who will be suffering. There is only one way this will happen, I am not asking for anything other then nature taking its course.
Maybe I was somewhat crass, but wanting a culture shift in a very natural way is neither alarming nor repugnant. If older generations didn't go away, we would still have slaves and society would be run by kings, and countless other out dated policies.
The baby boomer generation is larger then most so they have more votes and there out dated views are keeping us from being the best we could be.
Voting-age people 55 and younger (the youngest boomer is 56) have outnumbered people 56 and over for a long time. And in fact, showed up at the polls in greater numbers in 2016 and 2018 as well. [1]
Your disrespect for their humanity is indeed alarming and repugnant, as well as just plain misguided.
If we were to accept your claim that a "generation" can be to blame for something, today's politics and policy fall squarely on the younger ones based on their numbers.
Of course we are talking generationally here. Plenty of boomers bucked the trend, but by and large they defended the status quo, moved the nation economically to the right, locked everyone up for minor crimes, and just absolutely devastated the environment, to name just a few of their great accomplishments. Under the boomers, labor unions have all buy gone extinct. And for the record, the largest protests in US history have occurred amidst the rise of the millennials (Iraq war protests and Women's March).
> We thought we were doing the right thing by making Dashers whole when a customer left no tip
I don't understand this sentence (probably for cultural reasons) - what does 'whole' mean? Why do they need to be 'made whole' when they don't earn a tip?
They meant that they promised X dollars (X = "the whole amount owed for the service provided). DoorDash then assumed that a consumer would tip (x-y) dollars, and they would provide the balance. This allows them to pay their employees, because that's what they fucking are, even less.
Both consumers and Dashers assumed that the equation was instead X promised dollars PLUS Y tip dollars.
(e.g. A dasher is promised 5 dollars for a delivery. DD assumes that the customer will pay 4 dollars in tip, meaning the cost for DD should be 1 dollar. If the customer tips 2 dollars, they will "make whole" the Dasher by paying them 3 dollars in addition to the tip. This is all horse shit and people were pissed by this deception.)
You may not understand that sentence for cultural reasons because even for someone familiar with how tipping works in the US they might not understand the sentence either because it is the very definition of "gaslighting"[1].
"To be made whole" means to fix a wrong doing, or restore something to the way it should be. They're saying they thought they were making it up to the employees when a customer didn't leave a tip. Which is just them trying to save face.
Would this have been fair if their contract had said. “We pay $1 per delivery plus you get to keep all tips. If the total you get from delivery + tips is less than $10 we’ll pay the difference”
The thing I don't get: Customer orders a hamburger and DoorDash charges, say $15. The restaurant charges $12. DoorDash guarantees $9.87 or whatever to the driver. Generally a customer is not going to tip more than $4-5 for a $15 order. So how is this sustainable? But DoorDash obviously chose their model to avoid sticker shock of $12 charges on a $12 meal.
It's fascinating that Americans find this outrageous, given how the very same Americans consider it to be MY duty to tip 20% (since restaurants, despite being obscenely expensive, don't actually pay waiters unless waiters get less than minimum wage in tips; pretty much what DoorDash is doing)
You would think so, no? Yet, the entire US population seems to be fine with the notion that tips go to the restaurant, not the waiter.
Even in this Reservoir Dogs scene, the guy who brings forward the logical arguments is presented as a self-serving asshole who doesn't want to pay tips ( sum is ridiculously small - just 1$; and he wants to tip zero, despite ok service; the rule in most of the world is that you tip something - but far less than 20% - unless you had really bad service). So this entire sketch serves as a way to mock even the logical arguments against the tipping culture in US (what about the McDonalds workers? Is their work any easier? And why - WHY IN THE WORLD - are the restaurants allowed to dip into funds that are specifically designated as "tip, for the waiter"? At the very least, pay them minimum wage PLUS all the tips that they get - there shouldn't even exist a legal option to not do that!)
>American Airlines agreed this week to do something nice for its employees and arguably foresighted for its business by giving flight attendants and pilots a preemptive raise, in order to close a gap that had opened up between their compensation and the compensation paid by rival airlines Delta and United.
>Wall Street freaked out, sending American shares plummeting. After all, this is capitalism and the capital owners are supposed to reap the rewards of business success.
"they should have proactively said he would repay the wages taken from their workers. Instead, DoorDash will have pocketed millions of dollars taken from customer tips."
They didn't really 'take wages' from any of the workers. All of the money coming in is owned by DoorDash. They are now choosing to give a portion of that to the drivers (the tips).
DoorDash doesn't have a monopoly on gig jobs. You can choose to do something else if you don't feel the pay is fair. The reason they didn't really care about the drivers' opinions is because it obviously didn't stop many from driving.
They really did. The expectation when tipping is that there is some base pay being paid to the worker and then whatever I tip will be additional pay to the worker on top of that base. DoorDash was taking money out of that tip to pay the base pay so workers would then be getting less money than they should otherwise be getting.
Also, if their new system still has something like the "call option" to guarantee minimums it still seems like it's in everyone's best interest to not tip and get DoorDash paying as much as possible.