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Doordash workers are embroiled in a bitter labor dispute with the company: at issue, the tips that “Dashers” depend on to make the difference between a living wage and the poorhouse. Doordash has a long history of abusing its workers’ tips; including a particularly ugly case brought by the Washington, D.C. Attorney General, only settled when Doordash paid back millions in stolen Dashers’ tips.
Doordash maintains that its workers are “independent contractors” who can pick and choose among the delivery jobs available from moment to moment, based on the expected compensation. Given the outsized role that tips play in Dashers’ compensation, you’d think that the company would tell the workers the size of the tip that its customers had offered on each job.
But that’s not the case. Though customers input their tips when they place their orders, the amount is hidden from drivers until they complete the job – turning each dispatch into a casino game where the dealer knows the payout in advance but the worker only finds out whether they’ve made or lost money on a delivery after it’s done.
Dashers aren’t stupid – nor are they technologically unsophisticated. Dashers made heavy use of Para, an app that inspected Doordash’s dispatch orders and let drivers preview the tips on offer before they took the job. Para allowed Dashers to act as truly independent agents who were entitled to the same information as the giant corporation that relied on their labor.
But what’s good for Dashers wasn’t good for Doordash: the company wants to fulfill orders, even if doing so means that a driver spends more on gas than they make in commissions. Hiding tip amounts from drivers allowed the company to keep drivers in the dark about which runs they should make and which ones they should decline.
That’s why
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Read the original article: Tech Rights Are Workers’ Rights: Doordash Edition