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Comment by spywaregorilla | Hacker News Reader

I feel like there's a good opportunity for labor arbitrage or whatever you want to call it.

1) Get 10 friends

2) All friends log on to deliver food from 2am to 5am. Sleep and get paid.

3) When someone actually gets an order, you, and only you, do the labor. You can adjust the logic to cover edge cases where you don't actually have enough labor to fulfill the demand. We could call it surge pricing.

Uber for Uber Eats.

AFAIK, unlike Uber, there's no user auth to make this hard to do for food delivery.

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Paying people who aren't doing any work is generally the cost of providing 24/7 service coverage for a business, yes. Many people hired to do night shift have very little to do for most of the night.

Maybe Door dash et al shouldn't 'overhire'.

They pay for it with their health, though.

It is not clear to me that delivery companies have the agency to deny people's ability to work, however. If you must pay people for time that they are working, but there is no work to do, then you face a challenge with many people signing up to be paid for nothing. What do you do if 100 drivers start saying they're waiting for orders and there are no orders coming in?

What do you do if 100 drivers say they're waiting for orders, and a paltry number of orders come in that, unbenownst to Uber, get delegated to just 5 of those 100 while all 100 collect pay checks?

Of course they have the agency. They can limit the # of active drivers that can log in. Nobody is forcing them to have an unlimited number of drivers, just like nobody is forcing the Best Western down the road to hire an unlimited number of people to work their night desk.

It's just that under a business model where having more people on call not cost them anything, they were happy to expand the on call roster to an unlimited size.

>It's just that under a business model where having more people on call not cost them anything, they were happy to expand the on call roster to an unlimited size.

OK, sure, and the next logical step is telling the delivery people when they're on shift, where they have to wait when they're not making deliveries, and prohibiting them from multi-apping, etc.

I think there's a fine line between "our labor is underpaid, we should be paid more" and "let's destroy the entire business model" and I'm certainly excited to see how badly this will go. If I were to be cynical, I would say that there's a certain slice of the labor rights movement for whom any combination of the above would be a good outcome.

> OK, sure, and the next logical step is telling the delivery people when they're on shift, where they have to wait when they're not making deliveries, and prohibiting them from multi-apping, etc.

You've just realized why most employed people aren't paid by the keystroke, and why 'on-call' contractors that don't have reliable, consistent 9-5 work charge an incredible premium for their services.

If you've ever had yard-work done by unskilled labor or taken a taxi, you know that ain't the truth.

> OK, sure, and the next logical step is telling the delivery people when they're on shift, where they have to wait when they're not making deliveries, and prohibiting them from multi-apping, etc.

I don't understand exactly which workers are supposed to be angry about sitting somewhere and getting paid that wouldn't be angry about delivering something and getting paid. Or which ones are desperate to work on another app while they are currently being paid by the app they're on.

> "let's destroy the entire business model"

What interest does the state have in preserving this shitty business model?

>What interest does the state have in preserving this shitty business model?

I have no opinion on that - I'm simply assuming that the workers that are part of "this shitty business model" are not looking for it to be destroyed and feeling that there may not be an alignment of interests. What can be a win for "the worker" in the large abstract can be a loss for "these workers" in the specific.

That is not obvious to me at all. If they feel empowered to do that, they could, in theory, play it very tightly to short term demand and toggle people's "working status" and dodge this new law entirely. We don't want people idling around with apps that try to log in to uber every 10 seconds rather than people idling around logged in waiting for uber to send them a job. It's the same problem as before. This law is effectively saying uber must pay people for asking if uber has any work to do, in addition to doing it.

And maybe we're just saying no to the gig model. Sure, I'm for it. But this indirect approach is going to be an awkward way to get there imo.

they can do whatever every other company does when it overhires or has too many people working during a dead shift. this is a solved problem.

As far as I can tell, workers are not being paid for just being online. They get paid a prorated amount of this "hourly" wage during an active order.

I don't think so. Door dash is complaining that this will result in a $33/hour pay rate for trip time. The law seems to be that you may pay however you like, but it must average out to $18/hour (overall? per person??). So even if you're paying for trip time only, if 10 people are active and doing no trips it would imply the average pay rate for the one guy doing trips must rise to accommodate the non-workers.

So the scheme above doesn't work too well for those folks but the economics for door dash remain the same. It also kind of implies you can create surge pricing for workers by having an overabundance of supply, which is a nightmare scenario for them.

it's only $33/hr if you don't account for idle time (aka on call) and if the company chooses to pay based on trip time instead of per hour.

I feel like I explained that pretty clearly.

The problem is that you cannot easily define people on call. If $33/hr is the average comp for trip time when just one person is working at $18 overall, then they're saying an average worker works 55% of the time. If you add another person who just idles on call for the whole hour, you must now pay the one worker guy $66/hr for his working time.

The game theory here is not going to work.

why is the company allowing someone to sit idly on the app and jack up prices? they're able to determine surge pricing based on demand, surely they can just use that exact same algorithm to determine the number of workers they need and will allow to deliver orders?

simple checks like "did this person do >X number of deliveries in Y amount of time?" should let the company know who to "send home" the exact same as food service and retail currently works. the companies are not forced to allow anyone onto the app, just as businesses are not forced to allow any employee who shows up unscheduled to sit around and collect an hourly wage.

If you allow the company to "send people home" when there is no work then that is the same thing as allowing them to be waiting for work without getting paid. Because uber is not requiring them to be anywhere or do anything while waiting.

being on call and not working are not the same thing. if my boss tells me i need to be on call for our datacenter from 8pm-4am all week, i expect to get paid during that time regardless of if there's a critical incident or not. it means i have to be tied to my phone, cannot make plans with friends or family, and cannot stray too far from my home in case i need to dial in. same deal here.

Nothing you just said applies to delivery drivers. They are going to be paid while being "around to work" but not "on call". Or even more specifically this law is saying the ones actually driving need to be paid based on the number of people who are "around to work" regardless of whether they actually drive.

> 2) All friends log on to deliver food from 2am to 5am. Sleep and get paid.

Why would they let everybody log in if they don't get very much delivery business between 2am and 5am? There isn't a law yet that says that companies have to hire everyone who walks in the door for any shift.

Controlling the hours people work would make their labeling of people as not employees would be very contentious. And there's little difference between trying to log in and get work vs waiting for work.

Not really. The service itself can just close at night. It doesn’t have to operate 24/7 and accept all people working at all times in order to exist as a “marketplace” or whatever they are calling themselves legally.

That is probably true. But controlling when individuals can and cannot work during business hours is a different thing.

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