New York Acting Supreme Court Justice Nicholas Moyne rejected a bid by Uber, DoorDash and Grubhub to block a bill requiring a minimum wage for app-based delivery workers.
A first-of-its kind law requiring a minimum wage for app-based delivery workers will take effect after a judge rejected the companies' bid to block it.
Uber, DoorDash and Grubhub won’t be able to get out of paying minimum wage to their New York City delivery workers after all, following a judge’s decision to reject their bid to skirt the city’s new law. The upcoming law, which is still pending due to the companies’ ongoing lawsuit, aims to secure better wage protections for app-based workers. Once the suit settles, third-party delivery providers will have to pay delivery workers a minimum wage of roughly $18 per hour before tips, and keep up with the yearly increases, Reuters reports.
The amount, which will increase April 1 of every year, is slightly higher than the city’s standard minimum wage, taking into account the additional expenses gig workers face. At the moment, food delivery workers make an estimated $7-$11 per hour on average.
Remember when minimum wage driver work went up for a vote in California under prop 22 and we still voted against it? Im always so mad every election cycle i feel like everyone is a complete moron working against themselves
In those workers’ defense, the delivery companies spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a disinformation campaign to trick the public into thinking that voting for 22 was in their own interest.
It’s absurd that it was on the ballot in the first place.
Is it fair to call people stupid when they're facing a literal corporate propaganda campaign? I'd sooner reach for "corporations are evil" than "people are stupid" in that case. Remember how people used to treat you if you were against the Iraq war? And today, we know that thing was unnecessary and awful. Sometimes powerful people just manage to convince us of things that aren't true.
I don't see how this doesn't kill business for these companies.
Edit: I'm not defending the decision not to pay people more in general. It's more about the service going away altogether because the wage cost will be passed into the customers. But if that's what you fuckers want ok. I don't live in NY so it doesn't affect me. Enjoy losing access to all your delivery services.
Especially if it's a service. Maybe if your service business can't generate enough revenue to pay your employees then it's a service that doesn't need to exist?
Normally I wouldn't give a shit. But for these P2P businesses the unit economics for the business to be profitable requires passing on that expense to the end customer.
I'm not going to pay an extra $10+ dollars or whatever for my meal when I'm already tipping, paying tax, and service charge.
So I'm saying while it sounds awesome to pay people more, in this case it will just cause these services to go away.
Everyone down voted me like I'm defending the companies, but that's not my intention. It's more that these services as they are won't exist, so everyone loses. The employees lose the job and their customers lose the service. The company goes out of business too but that's not the issue I care about. We will effectively all lose delivery services except those willing to pay a lot for it, which stifles demand and makes the problem worse.
Anyway... I'm totally willing to hear counterarguments and certainly on the side of the workers, but the knee-jerk downvote and talk about how everyone needs a living wage isn't helping dive into the nuance of how these businesses operate and make money and what impact this decision will have on the business model.
Guess who's about to keep all employee tips... A minimum wage is a great first step, but stricter regulation will be needed to curtail the absurd levels of greed from these megacorps.
To those who live there: How does $18/hour in NYC compare to $20/hour in California (for the fast food thing recently passed here)? Is that a living wage there?
Household income for me and my wife was around $150k and we got priced out of the city. A lot of Dashers take late night trains deep deep outside of the city, or they live with half a dozen other Dashers on alternating schedules, sharing beds.
Not a resident of either but it's worth mentioning that this is NYC not NY state and California probably has suburban and rural areas that are much, much cheaper cost of living than NYC.