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The unfair labor practices of technology-based market economy enterprises have been well documented in recent years: low wages, instability and virtually no protection for workers, who are generally not legally clbadified as employees. And for just as long, many of these companies' customers have tried to ease some of the guilt that comes with the deliberate use of a poorly paid workforce with a good tip.
Yet some companies have incorporated these tips into the basic pay of their workers, retaining them effectively for themselves. It's basically a tip theft and, in a New York Times article published this weekend, a reporter lived it and fueled the conversation around one of the most insidious practices of the time of instant delivery.
Andy Newman, a reporter for the Times Metro section, spent six days cycling through the city as a courier for Postmates, Uber Eats, Seamless and DoorDash, temporarily joining a workforce that is usually made up of people including Maria Figueroa, director of the work and policies. for the Cornell University Worker Institute, called "the most vulnerable digital workers." Overworked and underpaid, food deliverers do not have a guaranteed minimum wage and are often injured on the job without the right to compensation.
Depending on the company they work for, they may not even reap the benefits of tips. During deliveries for DoorDash, Newman found that no matter what his customers said to him: he never saw a dime.
He writes:
DoorDash offers a guaranteed minimum for every job. For my first order, the guarantee was $ 6.85 and the customer, a Boerum Hill woman who had opened the door in a colorful bathrobe, had paid $ 3 through the app. But I still only got $ 6.85.
Here's how it works: if the woman in the bathrobe had rocked to zero, DoorDash would have paid the full $ 6.85. Because she gave $ 3, DoorDash only launched $ 3.85. She saved DoorDash $ 3, without tipping me.
The play provoked strong reactions on Twitter, where several discussions turned angry at the DoorDash policy. "I do not believe that one person intends to tip a multi-billion dollar venture capital start-up", wrote Louise Matsakis, cable technical reporter. "They try to tip the person who delivered their order. This deceptive model should be illegal. "
This policy – and the indignation towards it – is not new. In March, about 200 technicians and students signed a pledge not to work for DoorDash unless it committed to pay employees at least $ 15 per hour. The application of the San Francisco Labor Office standards also confirmed to Recode that it had opened an investigation for potential labor law violations in the city, the first time the department opened an investigation into a company based on the technology.
Although this survey may take months or even years, other states are also tackling this problem. In April, Ritchie Torres, a member of New York City Council, drafted a bill that would legally require apps to inform customers that their tips did not really go to the person who ordered them. A California bill introduced this spring has made it more difficult to clbadify concert hall workers as independent contractors, not employees. Other California legislators have attempted to give these independent contractors union rights, but these bills have come to nothing.
DoorDash is not the only company that uses tips to pay the base salary of its workers. In February, the Instacart grocery delivery application was indignant for the same practice; he then apologized publicly and announced that he would start paying his workers a new structure increasing the base salary from $ 3 to $ 7 and $ 10.
However, Chavie Lieber of Vox spoke to an Instacart employee in May, who said that these "solutions" left him with less pay than ever before. "Instacart says that our payments are based on some sort of algorithm, but they are not transparent to us and none of us knows how payments work," she said, adding that his income had dropped by 30%. At the time, Instacart told Vox that its payment system had been redesigned "to improve, improve and clarify buyer compensation."
Like many applications, Instacart offers workers ways to earn bonuses, for example by getting a five-star rating from a customer. However, the Instacart employee stated that the company had made it much more difficult for customers to find the verification tool. She also stated that the default tip had been reduced to only 5%.
Moreover, she suspected that the company always took the tips of the workers. "I talked to Instacart customers who looked at their customers' phones when they tipped $ 15," she said. "This will be confirmed on the customer's phone, but Instacart customers will only have one part left."
As Recode's Shirin Ghaffary points out, the problem of market economy technology firms is much more important than the theft of tips. Even when these companies claim to have unfair policies, they are free to find other ways to avoid paying fair wages to workers with little accountability or transparency. And since these workers are still considered independent contractors, they have no way of organizing and retaliating.
Even when workers receive full tips, after expenses they are still paid less than what could be considered a living wage – "by some estimates, less than $ 10 an hour after expenses – for jobs who sell workers with the promise of doing much more, writes Ghaffary.
These promises are often linked to ambitious ideas about the freedom and flexibility of the "brothel side". But this reasoning ignores the many people who concoct multiple jobs in the economy of great magnitude by necessity, but who do not enjoy the protections and benefits of a job. a full-time job.
DoorDash, for its part, says that 80% of its workers prefer the current payment model, introduced in 2017, because it guarantees a predictable amount even when customers do not pay a tip. The problem is that this predictable minimum is often the only money they will see, even when a customer tilts it. In February, DoorDash workers filed a clbad-action lawsuit against tip theft.
The new payment system has apparently worked well for DoorDash, which is now the leading online food delivery service. In May, just three months after raising $ 400 million, the group raised $ 600 million in hedge funds for a total valuation of $ 12.6 billion. In October 2018, Instacart also received $ 600 million in funding for a valuation of $ 7 billion. Meanwhile, application-based couriers are often paid literal pennies for long periods of time at work.
It is quite possible that the public does not hear what DoorDash is saying about the new report (Vox contacted the company, which did not immediately respond). Mike Isaac, technical reporter at the New York Times tweeted he has historically used the "wait it out" strategy for control. "That's what society relies on, implicitly," he wrote. "Normal people who order food do not really know or care enough about where their tips will complain to society."
Apathy towards market economy workers, whether from their own employers or from people who use their services, poses the greatest threat to the struggle for decent wages. As Ghaffary writes: "As long as the income division in the United States will worsen and the work system will be more and more two-tier, the long-term battle for workers' wages in technology companies that rely on low-paid contract work will continue. " is only, well, the tip of the iceberg.
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