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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 reading only the article and none of its cited sources: the change requires a $.50/minute increase while the driver is in the middle of a gig, or $17.96 (which is the rounded $18 in the headline). Assuming the driver is literally doing a job every minute (i.e. no gaps in-between deliveries), then that’s a $30 for an entire hour. So the cost-effective alternative is to have the employee on an hourly wage and just pay them $18/hr for x hours that they’re scheduled for. The quotes in the article explained how the switching from a per-job model to a “do as many jobs in the hours we schedule you for” means they’ll lose the benefit of flexible work schedules.
That said, I think the economy will speak for itself. Given the number of times I see companies complain in the media about “nobody wants to work”, they’ll need to pony up the money in order to maintain their share in the market.
That doesn’t make sense at all…it’s an $18/hr minimum, not maximum. They can still pay them more than that if they do more deliveries.
With the per-delivery model, the drivers have the option to pick and choose which jobs to accept.
Being speculative, I believe the scare tactic being used is: the driver can be assigned very unattractive deliveries without the power to refuse. As someone that does not do deliveries for any of these companies and periodically viewed posts from /r/doordash, I can only guess that this will hurt a smaller percentage of drivers that formulate a metagame to maximize their delivery income.
Just because they can, doesn't mean they will... They won't.