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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

How does DoorDash force drivers to work for them? It seems like they’re offering a compensation policy and drivers are determining that it’s among their best option.

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Drivers have no better option. It's easy to blame them as if they had the myriad employment options software engineers do. They don't, and the opportunity/operational cost of gig-work is not obvious or easy to overlook when you need to put food on the table tonight.

If DoorDash represents the drivers’ best option, it seems to me that we should be at least somewhat supportive of the arrangement they voluntarily enter into.

Taking away the drivers’ best option is, as you observe, not likely to leave them better off.

True, they can choose between working a miserable job that at least allows them to live for a bit longer (which is a low fucking bar), or just die out in the streets. Capitalism is magnanimous.

There is nothing voluntary about not wanting to die. It's working under threat.

Isn't this just how survival works? You hunt / till the land / turn the wheel in the factory / deliver food ordered on the internet / X to eat. It's a lot easier now than before, for sure.

If in 2022, in some of the wealthiest, most advanced countries on the planet, you need to _survive_, there's something pretty fucked up in your society. I'm not saying all out FALGSC no-one needs to work and thrives, but you should be able to live decently without selling your body to corporations treating you as nothing more than expandable meat.

It turns out that it takes raw materials, labor, and energy for you to survive. Someone, possibly you, has to provide those things.

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