Hacker News Reader

Comment by yuvalr1 | Hacker News Reader

This is true. it also hurts the public, as the drivers are dependent on the number of deliveries the succeed making, thus hurrying up and constantly stressed. This hurts not only their health and quality of delivery, but also increases the risk for traffic accidents.

It is in the best of interest of everyone that these people would get a normal salary.

View on HN

Have you seen the discourse about this on social media? People are furious that the price of delivered food has gone up recently. They're not going to vote for increased prices. That and heavy astroturf campaigns by the middlemen guarantee that this situation will remain.

And so long as there's more cheap workers available who can easily be replaced, it's hard for the workers to do anything about it.

>heavy astroturf campaigns by the middlemen guarantee that this situation will remain

Paying attention to California Prop 22 in 2020 shook me to my core in a way that I haven't been able to properly express. The money put into swaying public opinion for that was staggering. It makes me fearful for the future ahead of us.

> People are furious that the price of delivered food has gone up recently

If I was confident that increase was mostly going to the driver, I'd be fine with it.

I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with the gig economy model - it's a way of working that suits some workers and clients. But the balance of power needs to be shifted towards the workers (and clients) and away from the platforms.

I think this article is spot on. Platforms obfuscate their algorithms, and use that secrecy to play workers off against each other, and against their clients. Regulation would really help. There ought to be a right to...

1. An official explanation for each decision the algorithm makes. That could then be used as the basis for mandatory arbitration, if a party believes it's unfair.

2. Effective, and timely support from a human being, if that's required.

Together those would force the platforms to make their systems fairer (else be swamped by dealing with arbitration decisions), and easy to navigate (else be swamped by costly support calls).

I hope I'm not nitpicking semantics, but I believe part of the solution is in the discourse is to specify platform owners as the greedy actors here. E.g.:

>The balance of power needs to be shifted towards the workers (and clients) and away from the platform owners. >Platform owners obfuscate their algorithms, and use that secrecy to play workers off against each other

The platforms themselves are just code and capital, while actual human beings are leveraging them to implement this awful neo-taylorism on their workers. It would be like my grandfather being mad at "the factory" for horrible working conditions, rather than the shitty owner of the factory.

> Platforms obfuscate their algorithms, and use that secrecy to play workers off against each other, and against their clients.

Yeah, the secrecy is--if not evil on its own--a key component that allows evil (and maybe unlawful) things to occur.

A similar critique can be applied to content-moderation, where "security through obscurity" makes no sense because the whole point is to foster clear rules people can internalize and an authority they can trust.

As long as they get tips, they will continue to speed.

See: pizza delivery people for decades.

That makes it sound like too much of the responsibility is on drivers.

The history of pizza-delivery itself provides a sharp contrast: Domino's Pizza had a "30 minutes or less" guarantee during the 1980s and grew enormously from it, until a 1993 lawsuit over the accidents/deaths forced them to stop.

That systemic issue didn't come from delivery drivers, it was a top-down policy from the employer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com