There is an old adage that you don't want to see how the sausage is made. What rot. Watching sausages being made is not only entertaining but acts as a very helpful metaphor. Before things go into a sausage and into the casing, they are put through the grinder and ground into smaller particles.
So it is with watching the gig economy sausage being made. It is not pork or bread being put into the grinder but people and their time. From my time working in an accountant's office, I have now seen sufficiently enough gig economy sausages to come to the conclusion that I really really want to see how the sausage is made, and then personally cause shame to the owners of those companies.
Did somebody say Menulog? Ding dong. I want to punch you in the face, Menulog.
I had already pretty well much come to the conclusion that Uber is just a Ponzi Scheme which is actually designed to last just long enough for autonomous vehicles to arrive; so that that way, the trashbag company can chuck off its workers. We have already seen places like Woolworths and Coles, all four of the Big Banks, and even places like K-Mart, Big-W and Bunnings, replace checkout staff with self-service machines and in the case of the big banks, they are so scummy that they can't even be bothered to run their own automatic cash machines any more because they no longer see the worth in paying to maintain them.
The world of food delivery, which only seems to have existed immediately before the Covid-19 pandemic and really took off during it, is not much better. Just like the independent car share services like Uber, Lyft et cetera, which existed by ignoring taxi licences and then 'disrupting' the industry by making existing the value of taxi buttons fall through the floor, the food delivery service business is basically a taxi service for people's food.
There are four big players in the food delivery service in Australia. Those four being: Uber Eats, Deliveroo, Menulog, and Doordash. All of them run really opaque payment calculation systems; so much so that when someone gave me the documentation so that I could have a look at it, the information was so scant as to be useless. All of them have hidden payment algorithms; which means that it is impossible to know what the value of any given delivery will be. If I as an accountant find this impossible to look at and decipher, then what hope does a poor person at the end of the app have?
Not one of these delivery platforms guarantee that their workers (who are little more than on-demand gig contractors) any kind of wage at all; let along anything that resembles the minimum wage. Their payment schedules which are opaque are like stepping into a casino, where every game is designed to make the house win handsomely. I suspect that the lack of clarity of payment schedules is actually a deliberate tactic because if the workers can't even work out what they're supposed to be paid, then they can't very well mount any kind of legal challenge for exploitation.
What's worse is that the kinds of people who are likely to work for these scumbucket platforms, are likely to be young people, or recent migrants, or students. These kinds of people are less likely to complain about being driven into the ground; which means that they are even more easily exploited than other people and because the workers of these food delivery services are classified as independent contractors rather than employees, they already don't have a lot of bargaining power (ie. nil) when it comes to working conditions.
In treating people as independent contractors rather than employees these companies likely don't pay sick leave, they don't accrue any other kinds of normal entitlements such as maternal and paternal leave, long service leave, and worst of all they don't cover the insurance, work place safety, or superannuation expenses which the workers should provide for themselves as 'independent' contractors. By severing the chain, they have managed to get out of a bunch of normal obligations.
We have now had to do a number of people's tax returns for 'employees' of these four scumbucket companies and as an exercise my boss though it useful to take all the limited data that we have and generate some kind of general statistics. The average rate of pay in hand, across Uber Eats, Deliveroo, Menulog, and Doordash, as far as our data is concerned is $27.73 per hour. They will argue that they pay much more than that and as much as $40 per hour but this hides the fact that a lot of the time, they actually pay $0 per hour when there are no jobs on.
From that $27.73, they have to find all of their running costs of keeping a car/motorbike in operation; which includes wear and tear on the vehicle, all maintenance and insurance, as well as running the possibility that the general public are also a bunch of brutish knaves who might cause physical violence to them. I suggest that the net rate after factoring in all of these expenses is actually less than the minimum wage.
Assuming that you could actually get 40 hours per week, then that would equate to a yearly wage of $57,875. Is that assumption fair? Absolutely not. People only get paid piecemeal, for the deliveries that they do, and even if they expected amount that they are going to get is less than the effort required to do the delivery, they're still expected to make the delivery because these scumbucket companies also thought it fun to gamify the service and let people rate the drivers.
All things considered, Uber Eats, Deliveroo, Menulog, and Doordash, are utterly horrible and exploitative. I do not have enough expletives to describe them.
What can you do? Refuse to use them. Okay, there is a general argument that you are doing folks a favour by paying them to deliver your for but if these services didn't exist, then they'd be getting proper employment at a proper company. It is not charitable to hide behind an app and underpay people. What we especially do not want is a tipping culture to emerge because that's also based on a scumbucket set of economic circumstances where employers underpay people.
You can refuse to work for them. You can refuse to use Uber and Lyft services and use actual taxis. Yes, they will cost you more but that's the point. If you consider the dignity of people worth something, pay them. Workers deserve their wages and withholding people's pay via the mechanism of scumbucket gig apps, means that you are just as much of a scumbucket as the companies.
My mum once said that you shouldn't hate someone or something unless you want them or it dead. I want Uber Eats, Deliveroo, Menulog, and Doordash, dead. I hate them. I want the people who would have worked for them to be paid properly.
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