Getty Images
The day-to-day realities of a gig economy driver for DoorDash and Postmates: 12-hour days, bad tips, customer abuse, and parking tickets
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23096704/onefairwage.jpeg "The book cover for “One Fair Wage”")
Buy “One Fair Wage” at Amazon or Bookshop now.
In 2013, Saru Jayaraman founded One Fair Wage to put an end to the tipped minimum wage, which, One Fair Wage has found, perpetuates racial and gender disparities in the hospitality industry. Those disparities only worsened during the pandemic, as restaurants closed and the prospect of earning a living from tips became even more precarious.
With her newest book One Fair Wage: Ending Subminimum Pay in America, published in the fall of 2021, Jayaraman furthers the movement. With each chapter, she highlights the ways the tipped minimum wage exploits workers from a particular job category, including restaurant servers, delivery drivers, nail technicians, and more. In this excerpt from the book, Jayaraman details one delivery worker’s experience and interrogates the failure of tech companies like DoorDash and Postmates to improve wages, and thus, conditions for their workers. — Monica Burton
Vianne Curiel had wanted to be a singer songwriter for as long as she could remember. Music was her passion. “I’ve been writing songs since I was 13!” she recalls. She spent her earliest years across the U.S.-Mexico border in San Luis Río Colorado before her parents moved to Yuma, Arizona. “I was a baby. My parents and I lived in an old trailer in Sonora until I was two or three, then they came back to Arizona and they bought a house. My dad was a field worker, and my mom worked for the DMV. From there they slowly saved until they could establish their own car dealership.”
Vianne had dual citizenship and went to Mexico to study communications and marketing at the Universidad Regiomontana in Monterrey. By the time she returned in 2012, she felt that as “an independent artist, I didn’t have funds to pursue my music career.” Her parents weren’t in a position to help her financially. In any case, they didn’t approve of her musical efforts and wanted her to follow in their footsteps and work in the car dealership. “They kicked me out of the house,” she said. “They left me out on the streets. I didn’t know what to do. So I moved to LA with $200.” Vianne always said that she was going to live in LA, but she never thought it would happen like that. She packed her car with the few belongings she had and moved into a studio apartment with her cousin. “She said you have a month to get a job and pay rent.”
Finding a good job in LA proved very difficult. “I started building up my resume, but I couldn’t find a job,” she said. Part of the problem was that her work experience was all in Mexico. Vianne was doing everything she could to survive in Los Angeles. She explained, “I was always tight on money because I wouldn’t make enough, even working four or five jobs. It was very exhausting.” Vianne applied to work as a food delivery worker for Postmates and DoorDash, two relatively recent app-based delivery services. Vianne credits this decision with helping get her back on her feet. “I heard about Postmates from someone I knew in LA, and they said this is easy, quick money.” She found the idea embarrassing at first, but decided she would just go ahead and try it. Embarrassed by her own embarrassment, she thought, “Seriously, I have to become a better human.”
After Vianne filled out the applications for Postmates and DoorDash and underwent a brief training session, “I just got in my car and I started delivering food.” As with most gig economy workers, Vianne continued working multiple jobs. “I was working at Postmates, and I was working for a gym as well. I was working for the gym membership because I couldn’t afford a gym. And then I worked for a meal prepping company where I cooked meal prep for athletes and washed dishes.” Unfortunately, this led her to put her true love, her music career, on hiatus. “I stopped making music for that whole year and got very depressed about it. I didn’t have inspiration or motivation to write songs anymore because I was trying to get back on my feet.” She sees 2017 as a make-or-break experience, “one of the worst years of my life. It was a turning point: either life would break me or there would be a breakthrough and I’d just start all over, start fresh.” Vianne recalled being told that if you make it a year in LA, everything gets easier, adding, “LA is a very expensive city to live in. I can tell you that for sure.”
As gig platforms have taken over the food delivery and ride-share markets, unions and worker advocates have sought to ensure gig workers at least the same protections enjoyed by other workers — and to push back on multibillion-dollar corporations’ desire to maintain these workers as independent contractors exempt from minimum wage, unemployment insurance benefits — which became a major issue during the pandemic — and other benefits and protections guaranteed other workers in their states.
While the companies attempted to posit that these work arrangements created more flexibility for drivers and were an innovative evolution of work, in fact corporations’ attempts to label workers as independent contractors dates back to the New Deal, when companies sought to misclassify first Black workers and then other workers as independent contractors to similarly avoid minimum wage and other protections awarded employees — a trend so common even before the emergence of gig companies it has been labeled “misclassification.”
In part since so many of the newly expanding gig companies were born in Silicon Valley, California, much of the worker organizing efforts to fight misclassification and establish greater protection for gig workers started in California. In 2018, the efforts of unions and worker organizations led to the Supreme Court of California issuing a landmark decision in the case Dynamex Operations West, Inc. v. Superior Court. Dynamex stated that most workers are employees and that any company seeking to classify a worker as an independent contractor must meet a stringent burden of proof to do so.
In early 2019 these efforts gained steam with a series of New York Times exposés on food delivery companies such as DoorDash. Among all the harassment, safety, and compensation issues lifted up by these exposés, the one that stirred the most consumer outrage was that several of these companies were deducting the delivery workers’ payments by the amount they were tipped. In fact, these companies were simply emulating the restaurant industry’s subminimum wage system dating back to Emancipation — reducing their workers’ pay based on how much they were tipped. While there has been some debate among worker organizers of gig workers as to whether they should fight to eliminate independent contractor status for these workers completely, there is no debate with regard to whether these workers deserve a full, livable wage with tips on top and all of the rights and benefits that other workers are afforded by their state. Clearly, as long as we allow any industry to use a subminimum wage because of tips, more and more industries will seek to follow suit.
In September 2019, the California State Legislature expanded upon the Dynamex decision with the passage of Assembly Bill 5 (AB5), which required gig platform companies to treat their workers as employees, with all the rights and protections awarded other employees in the state of California, including minimum wage, paid sick leave, workers’ compensation, and other rights. The bill was hailed as a national model for instituting workers’ rights in the gig sector, but the gig platforms immediately pushed back, mobilizing hundreds of millions of dollars to put into Proposition 22, a ballot measure placed on the November 2020 ballot that would not only repeal AB5 but also allow the gig platforms to pay their workers the equivalent of a subminimum wage. The gig companies united behind this ballot measure and launched a public relations campaign to attempt to portray that independent contractor status was necessary to ensure workers’ flexibility — and thus a feature all workers preferred — and also that their measure was backed by progressive and racial justice organizations.
Despite the fact that the pandemic put all of these workers in grave danger while they were offered none of the unemployment insurance benefits given other workers, the gig companies were able to use expensive and sophisticated propaganda to confuse voters. The companies sent out mailers purporting to be progressive voter guides called “Feel the Bern, Progressive Voter Guide,” “Council of Concerned Women Voters Guide,” and “Our Voice, Latino Voter Guide” — none of which are actual organizations — that provided guidance on a number of...