A first-of-its kind law requiring a minimum wage for app-based delivery workers will take effect after a judge rejected the companies’ bid to block it.
Uber, DoorDash and Grubhub won’t be able to get out of paying minimum wage to their New York City delivery workers after all, following a judge’s decision to reject their bid to skirt the city’s new law. The upcoming law, which is still pending due to the companies’ ongoing lawsuit, aims to secure better wage protections for app-based workers. Once the suit settles, third-party delivery providers will have to pay delivery workers a minimum wage of roughly $18 per hour before tips, and keep up with the yearly increases, Reuters reports.
The amount, which will increase April 1 of every year, is slightly higher than the city’s standard minimum wage, taking into account the additional expenses gig workers face. At the moment, food delivery workers make an estimated $7-$11 per hour on average.
Pizza delivery is generally handled by each individual restaurant with some dedicated employees, so it’s a pretty different model than something like Uber Eats. Pizza is also fast, cheap, and simple, so that helps to drive down costs. It’s also generally a complete meal for at least two people, if not a whole group, and so the delivery cost gets split across more people.
I get the comparison, but I don’t think they’re really as analogous as they seem. One is a pizza place hiring a delivery person or two to drive some pizza around; the other is a large tech company settled with debt and inventor obligations paying very expensive engineers to manage incredibly complicated logistics networks and deal with tens of thousands of distinct parties.
This is really kinda my point. Why is pizza delivery so much cheaper? Because it doesn’t have to deal with all these extra costs that a massive delivery network like Uber inherently has to manage. I imagine we’ll eventually hit some kind of equilibrium where a lot of restaurants that can manage it have their own in-house delivery people, while the large networks will have to dramatically downsize or die.