What I struggle with is why anyone would deliver for Door Dash if the pay is so bad.

The article closes with a statement that they want $15/hour plus expenses for drivers. The obvious problem is that I can’t see customers paying that much for delivery - ie. at those wages Door Dash can’t exist.

The fact that people choose to do the work makes me think there are people who find it worthwhile, and I can explain a few scenarios that make a lot more sense than the ones in the article:

I live in SF, which is only about 7mi by 7mi square, so if you do door dash here it’s very unlikely for a delivery to require more than 2-3 mi of travel. Further I see a lot of deliveries made on bikes, skateboards, scooters, etc. so the cost is much lower than the suburban deliveries made by car.

I see a lot of young delivery people, who I imagine may be high school or college students who just want a few bucks spending money without any kind of time commitment, and maybe this works nicely for them.

Regulating the wages to try and turn door dash into a “family feeding” job seems like it would do nothing but kill the business (and all the gig businesses), depriving people who want that kind of ultimate flexibility of the freedom and also depriving customers of a really convenient service.

But I do think regulation could be very beneficial in creating transparency around payment to both the customer and the gig worker. I can see no reason the companies should be allowed to obscure what they pay their workers, where tips for, how many miles the worker traveled on a job etc. That kind of information is fair and reasonable to provide, and would help avoid gig companies exploiting people who unfortunately may not understand how to properly value their expenses.

The final thing I would argue is that it’s reasonable to prohibit blind auctions, as door dash does.

Instead of randomly pairing a person to a job, giving them only seconds to respond, and penalizing them (by not offering more) if they fail to respond, it would be much more fair to have a real-time auction map showing all deliveries that need to be picked up in a certain area, where they need to go, how much the pay is, and then letting them “sit on the map” and slowly tick up in price until a worker picks one. That’s a half-baked brainstorm so maybe that’s not the right implementation, but my point is simply:

1. I think regulating gig wages is a blunt instrument that would mostly end the gig companies and possibly entrench one or two mega corps as survivors that are still exploitive toward workers - whereas providing information transparency could potentially preserve the good things about gig jobs while eliminating the majority of bad outcomes for workers.

2. The real problem seems to be that there are so many people in need of “family feeding” jobs who are working for Door Dash etc. instead. When we talk about a “historically low unemployment rate,” things like this make it ring hollow to me. Clearly there are a lot of people unable to get better work, who as a result are really hurting economically, and we need to do a better job measuring and understanding that problem so we can respond more effectively to it.