This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
"Uber Eats and DoorDash hid tip buttons and set default tips below 10%. As a result, tips for delivery workers fell 79%," Mamdani wrote on X. "In January, we made these corporations change their apps."
Not on board with this, JUST PAY THEM A PROPER WAGE.
Tipping culture is stupid.
While I share the sentiment, he doesn't have control over Federal wage laws. Ensuring that being tipped sufficiently is the norm is about the best option he has to protect tipped wages. I'm not sure if he can somehow ban tipped employment within the city or not. If he can, maybe that'll be planned in the future.
Can cities not set their own? Federal minimum wage is the floor if the local legislation doesn’t set a minimum.
They can. Seattle’s minimum wage is the highest in the country, and we even have mandated that delivery services pay this minimum wage. Now they show “extra fees” to “pay for this” like they didn’t have the money for it before…
Annoying but it’s a start in the right direction.
It’s ridiculous anyway that federal minimum wage is still $7.25 🤦♀️🤦♀️
taking away their shitty toys has to be done too.
Exactly! Set the minimum wage to a reasonable level; mandating tip buttons by law is asinine. The government should be discouraging paying people via tips, not mandating it.
I think part of the problem is also that these delivery drivers aren't wage employees. They're technically self employed/contractors for these companies. Which means that the rules about pay and minimum wage are slightly different
I don't know of a single person who drives their own car for these delivery apps that makes a significant profit after taking into account their milage/gas costs. Many people actually claim a loss if their vehicle isn't very fuel efficient and they aren't being efficient about doing multiple deliveries on one route. The only people I know who make decent money are those that do deliveries with a bike. So while Mamdani can help the situation a little with city ordinances and stuff, what we really need is federal regulation on these companies
In Germany that is called "scheinselbstständig" like "bogus self-employment", a worker who is officially hired as an independent contractor/freelancer, but in reality works like a dependent employee. And that is illegal since it specifically undermines employment laws etc.
Damce monkey dance. Throw money.
Is the mayor gig not paying well enough?
Well, he did refuse a raise. So maybe?
They couldn’t afford a raise, it was a pizza party.
I mean they're trying in the affordability thing but it's still New York.
Just make them roll an extra 15% into the cost of delivery and pay the drivers more. Tips are dumb.
If you want a luxury food delivery service, then pay the luxury cost.
That shit is already marked up to hell and back. If they bumped it up another 15%, it would be even more insane.
Honestly, if they killed them and brought us back to restaurants hiring their own delivery drivers I think we'd be better off.
Fr. I'm so sick of ordering directly from a restaurant only for them to send me a doordash delivery link to track my order. At least domino's (the only pizza place that will delivery to my area somehow??) has their own drivers
I have a short list of local places that hire their own drivers and I refuse to order delivery from anywhere else. I'll pick it up or just miss it altogether. No need to participate in the enshitification of everything.
What possible benefit is it to these companies to hide the tip button? The usual scam is that the company keeps some or all of the tips for themselves.
Corey doctorow writes about this in his brilliant book "Enshittification - Why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about ut it.".
It's to take away the power for drivers to choose rides based on earnings.
The tipping is manipulated by the company both towards drivers and customers, to optimize for profit above predictable earnings for drivers and reliable service and fast deliveries for customers.
It's algorithmic manipulation and "twiddling with the knobs" to bring in marginally more profit and less payout per transaction.
Just like Uber does with it's transportation services. Drivers that take any ride that comes up, earn less pr drive, while drivers that are reluctant will get incentivised to drive more (and then gradually earn less).
Companies are using the huge amounts of data they have to manipulate both customers and service providers, it's the devil in all these "middleman" businesses. It's a rotten and hugely shitty way of doing things and its gradually becoming the norm for fucking everything.
I cannot recommend Corey's book enough, not only is it clear and concise in describing these mechanisms in several markets and technologies, it's easy to read and witty with Corey's beautiful bitter sarcastic takes all the way through.
Mass data has made everything worse. Everything has to be optimized now down to the 0.000001% to make sure every cent is sucked away from regular people.
Doctorow has also been doing podcasts recently (probably as visibility to promote his book). He's been on with both Trevor Noah and Jon Stewart recently that I saw.
Really great (and depressing) hearing him lay out all the ways things have enshittified
I love how much humor and sarcastic he brings with him talking about these topics, though. Makes it easier to actually listen to what the issues are, makes him a great guest for shows (so gets the message out more) and I also love that he does go over ways tech also enables us to fight back.
My guess would be that a lower price will equate to more sales, whilst the company itself doesn't lose out on any of their revenue.
In that case they would like to get rid of tipping entirely, but then the drivers would stop driving.
My dad drives for Uber Eats and he accepts less than half of all delivery offers that are sent to him while he’s signed in. Many of those offers pay so poorly he would lose money on fuel costs if he did accept them. Shit like somebody wanting him to drive across town to deliver them a single Starbucks drink and putting no tip on the offer. Some of these things are just idiots not knowing how to use the app and picking restaurants that are 10 miles away instead of the equivalent restaurant nearby.
My dad makes most of his money from expensive orders to high end restaurants where people put down $20+ tips, but those are not common enough to rely on. Thankfully, where we live, the government has forced Uber Eats to “top up” his pay to minimum wage if it falls short, and they aren’t allowed to include tips in that calculation.
If this is what winning looks like, I want to keep winning
This guy keeps proving me wrong about not liking him. Good stuff. I love being wrong when its beneficial to citizens of wherever. And he seems to be the one politician in the US actually doing something good, who would have thought?
Curious, why didn't you like him? I live on the complete opposite side of the country, so I'm pretty far removed, but everything I've heard about him has been positive.
During his campaign he made, like any other fucking politician, many promises that were unhinged for anyone that knows anything on how the government infrastructure works at the federal, state and city levels, and of course that made me instantly put him together with the rest of the politicians. Don't get me wrong, the other 2 candidates were infinitely worse, no discussion there. As expected, when he won, and took office, he had to pedal back on some of those promises. However, as I said, I AK happy for New Yorkers to see that I was wrong about the guy, as he keeps surprising me in the best way possible. Now, make no mistake, he is still a politician, and I hold absolutely no faith in any of them, left, right, center, up or down. But the guy is, by miles, the best official in any seat in the US right now. I also like Kennedy from Texas, but for entirely different reasons. The guy is a solid attorney and will destroy his opponents with facts, even if he doesn't like the facts himself. Again, he is a politician, so I'm sure he's full of shit too, but it is fun to see him perform though. Full disclosure, I'm jot from NY, but I would certainly like a mayor in my city like Mandani, ours is a fucking moron that can't tell chocolate from shit 😒
Cities typically offer public transport, so I do wonder what it would it would take for a city to run their own ride-sharing service. There are various open source Uber alternatives, but not sure how good any of them are. Marketing and getting people to use something like this would be the hard part for any independent organization, but a city government should have a much easier time getting people to use it.
The state of Massachusetts runs a paratransit system for people who can't use public transit. It's expensive and not great. They've started to offload some ridership to Uber and Lyft where it makes sense, e.g. people without wheelchairs.
Government agencies partnering with Uber and Lyft unfortunately does seem to be pretty common, which goes in the opposite direction of creating less exploitative alternatives.
