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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

I think doordash will win this one if they take it to court.

They were careful to word it as "take home pay guarantee". That guarantee looks at the actual payment per delivery, plus tips, and makes it up to a minimum.

It seems clear from all the marketing materials I've seen.

Doordash can simply argue this guarantee was on top of the regular pay, and was totally optional, and every contractor only stands to gain from this guarantee.

I'm pretty sure the whole aim of this case is to crucify doordash in the court of public opinion, despite their case being strong in an actual court of law. My elected politicians shouldn't be allowing that - if there are gaps in the law, address them directly!

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I don't like/didn't like this practice from DD (I think they're finally phasing it out after much criticism), but it worked exactly the same way tipping at restaurants works, so that is a precedent they can call upon as well.

uh, what? It has been very well established that managers at restaurants cannot offset your income or otherwise steal tips. It's possible your confusing tip sharing, which is legal, but, and this is important, does not allow the tips to be "shared" with the employer.

It's not "stealing tips" and it's literally written explicitly into the laws around minimum wage in federal law in the US.

The federal minimum wage is set to $7.25 per hour, with a very clear exemption for tipped workers, that the employer contribution only needs to be $2.13 per hour as long as the tips bring the total wage up over minimum on a weekly basis. If the employee gets lower tips, the employer is required to pay additional wages to bring their total wages up to the guaranteed minimum. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipped_wage

The problem isn't that DoorDash is doing some new, nefarious thing. They're doing exactly the same thing a restaurant does when they pay a server somewhere between $2.13 and $7.25 per hour depending on how customers tip. The problem is that apparently most people don't understand how tipping and wages for tipped employees have worked for traditional restaurants for decades.

But that isn’t what the tipping industry does. You are paid a certain hourly wage, and if the tip income is below a certain amount the employer has to increase the wage to compensate. They cannot however reduce your hourly pay rate after you have done the work. Because that is tip theft, simply reclassifying your income after the fact doesn’t magically make it not theft.

Because if that were allowed an employer could hire you at $20/hour (for example), and then decide at the end of your day to change your pay rate to $10/hour and that would be ok - because by your definition that isn’t wage theft.

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