'Honestly The Apps Pay You Dirt': Inside The Fight For Digital Delivery Workers's Rights

By Jessica Suriano


For Lucas Grassi, a 22-year-old DoorDash driver in Tucson, Arizona, hints can make or break a day of delivery service. Although some days he has wondered if insights make a difference at all, in part because, up until recently, the app’s breakdown just hasn’t been transparent enough.


Grassi has been picking up gigs on DoorDash for the past eight months and on Postmates for over one year; he delivers orders up to 20 hours per week as soon as he’s not busy being a full-time student. However he says the payment breakdowns he sees on apps right after he completes deliveries rarely make it clear if clients tipped him, how much they tipped, or maybe if they tipped at all.


“I don't really trust [it] at all,” Grassi told MTV News. “I feel like I would be creating a lot more cash than I actually am.”


He had good reason to be suspicious. Up until recently, any insights clientele gave to their DoorDash drivers via app only decreased how much cash DoorDash had to contribute to the guaranteed minimum pay; the drivers weren’t acquiring any of that tip. The older policy also made DoorDash, which is currently worth over $12 billion, an outlier: Drivers who work for Grubhub, Instacart, Postmates, and Uber Eats can expect to keep 100 percent of hints from clients. Instacart used to subsidize drivers’ pay with tricks, although reversed its policy in February immediately after enduring public scrutiny. As of publishing time, Amazon Flex and Caviar, which is owned by DoorDash, still use tricks to decrease how much they have to pay workers; in Caviar’s case the only way this changes is if the driver is able to surpass the weekly guaranteed pay.


Soon after facing widespread criticism over its policy, DoorDash announced on July 23 that it would show drivers a breakdown in the app immediately after each categorize of how much cash they made from working for DoorDash, plus their earnings from a customer’s tip. (The agency did not return a request for comment made by MTV News.) Then, on August 22, DoorDash introduced a new plan, which promised its gig workers would pocket 100 percent of tricks. The agency also promised to increase its base pay, and incentivize those who wanted to work while in given “Peak Pay” hours. DoorDash CEO Tony Xu claimed that gig workers would earn more cash on average, and promised the organization could be working with a undisclosed third party to make sure they were, well, putting cash where their mouths were.


Still, the policy change was also late to dodge legal action: In February, two DoorDash drivers in Georgia, Jamie Webb and Aaron Hodge, filed a class action lawsuit against the corporation for “misrepresenting to drivers the true nature of their pay and the allocation of tips,” according to the legal document. The plaintiffs are demanding a jury trial and that DoorDash pay back drivers the cash they would have made from 100 percent of customer hints. A second class action lawsuit was filed in July on behalf of Alan Arkin, a New York resident who’s made 38 DoorDash orders, and on behalf of any other DoorDash customer who may also feel deceived about who was benefiting from tips.


However it’s likely that job possibilities like those offered by DoorDash and other convenience-driven apps will only continue to grow, especially as increasingly young people move toward freelancing and a more and more precarious gig economy. In an economy of slow-moving wage growth, exorbitant costs of housing, and where the student debt crisis has reached $1.5 trillion in outstanding cash advances, it’s not surprising that nearly half of millennials — much more than older generations — announced working in the gig economy to earn additional cash, according to a Bankrate survey. There really isn't a limitless provide of fairly-compensated full-time jobs, so turning to gig work feels less like a choice than it does a necessity for several people.


“We have an affordability crisis affecting America,” Ritchie Torres, a councilmember for New York City’s 15th district, told MTV News. “There are also several Residents of the United States who cannot afford to keep pace with the cost of living with one job. You have people who are solidly-middle-class or solidly-working-class working numerous jobs in the gig economy just to keep themselves and their family member afloat.”


And insights are an essential piece of that revenue. Shani Hogan, 23, told MTV News that she often makes more cash from a tip than from an order’s guaranteed minimum pay any time once she makes deliveries in the Los Angeles area. As a recent graduate from Loyola Marymount University, she mentioned she currently depends entirely on her Postmates revenue to afford expenditures of living, and her hints are constantly the most crucial determining factor of how much that will be.


“Food delivery is just as importantly tip-based as being a waiter,” she mentioned. “Honestly, the apps sort of pay you dirt — you don't get paid a lot for how much you're driving and why much time you're spending.”


While several apps prompt you with buttons that calculate tricks at given percentage points, some people believe you have to be paying more altogether. At Eater, the food writer Helen Rosner made a case that “the absolute minimum acceptable tip for any food delivery is $5” — and it should routinely be in cash. And thanks in part to social media, both clients who meant for their hints to go directly into drivers’ pockets and app-based delivery drivers themselves have sparked broader conversations about the kinds of treatment workers in the gig economy should expect from their employers.


“Tipped workers are among the most weak people in our society,” Torres mentioned. “Federal law treats them as indentured servants who are entitled to a sub-minimum wage of $2.13,” referring to the pay model called tipped wage, which permits an employer to count hints towards a worker’s wages. However while restaurant workers have minimum-wage protections that quota the quantity of insights that can be used toward wages, delivery drivers don't. Identically, New York City was the initial city to pass a minimum wage rate for drivers of the ride-hailing businesses Uber, Lyft, By way of the, and Juno, yet currently there really isn't a similar protection for on-demand delivery drivers. Therein lies the point of exploitation.


Torres is hoping to change things with new legislation: A bill that would need an app-based delivery service to disclose whether 100 percent of insights are actually given to workers, or are incrementally increasing the company’s profit. It’s currently in the drafting stages, and he hopes to introduce it by the end of the summer.


He’s not alone in his calls to action to support gig economy workers, either: Brad Lander, a councilmember for New York City’s 39th district, wants to introduce a bill that would construct a living-wage requirement for delivery workers and all other independent contractors. Obviously, freelance work looks differently depending on the job sector, which adds another layer of complications to drafting the bill. Still, he views the fight as one worth navigating.


“The fact that these gig agencies have come up with a new organization model which is beneficial for their bottom line and convenient for clients — although impoverishing for workers — is unacceptable,” he told MTV News.


The dispute over earned tricks is just one of the myriad of problems facing the industry. Most app-based delivery drivers — as well as 41.5 percent of the American workforce — are imagined non-employee workers, meaning they don’t receive advantages like health insurance or workers’ compensation if they’re injured or become sick on the job, and are not protected by federal anti-discrimination laws.


In California, Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez wrote a bill that would reclassify gig economy workers as personnel and guarantee them more protections. Uber and Lyft oppose the bill, referred to as Assembly Bill 5, nevertheless have proposed introducing some advantages or protections for their drivers without reclassifying them as personnel. In July, the Senate Committee on Standing Committee on Labor, Public Employment and Retirement, passed the bill with a 4-to-1 vote. Right now the measure will move to the state’s Senate Appropriations Committee, and has even obtained support from Presidential candidate Kamala Harris.


“I guarantee you, if the new usual is ‘if I hire you over an app, you have no rights,’ every one of our jobs are at stake, even mine, because we are going to all become demand workers,” Gonzalez said at a rally for the bill. “On demand isn't how we construct a middle class, it’s not how we sustain our middle class jobs, and we cannot sell out to an idea that just because they hire you by an app that you don’t have the same rights.”


Other folks are attempting to mobilize on a larger scale with boycotts: Earlier this year, software engineer and tech sector activist Anna Geiduschek, 27, penned a open letter on Medium to DoorDash denouncing its tipping policy. The letter states that the current and future tech workers who sign it are vowing never to work for DoorDash up until they fix their pay policies. For now, hundreds of tech workers and delivery drivers have signed it in support.


“I worked at Dropbox for a couple of years and saw firsthand how hard it is to recruit engineering candidates in the Valley — how key it is that these businesses have a good pipeline of recruits,” Geiduschek told MTV News. “And so, to sort of jeopardize that seemed like the most powerful thing that I may do.”


Among her letter’s necessitates is a phone call to meet a pay floor of $15, which matches the minimum wage suggested by the House-approved Raise the Wage Act. The pathway to an increased federal minimum wage has become a talking point among presidential candidates for now, and the Raise the Wage Act is an integral part of that conversation. The Act not only promises to improve the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2025, yet would also phase out the subminimum wage for tipped workers.


According to Geiduschek, structural change is the most common-sense solution. “It's much easier to force [companies] to do the correct thing through policy that would treat these workers like personnel, and give them advantages, and need that they pay minimum wage immediately after charges, and all the things that we expect that you must have the ability to have out of any job,” she said.


And for drivers, legislative efforts could change their excellent class of life for the better. Take Hogan, who says she is constantly running out of cash to afford the gas for her vehicle to deliver orders.


“[Making more money] would probably change my life substantially,” she mentioned. “When this job becomes your main job, it’s really hard.”