Thread by @doctorow

Dashers aren't stupid. They know that the difference between a profitable @Doordash delivery and one where they earn less than they spend on gas is the size of the tip they get at the end of the job.

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Of course, Doordash knows this too. The company - a corporate predator with a history of wage theft and worker misclassification - knows that its only hope of sustainability is to make real, profitable businesses like restaurants dependent on it.

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If Doordash can impose a toll-booth between businesses and customers, it can siphon off the restaurants' profits (and if it kills the restaurants in the process, it can replace them with ghost kitchens - fake restaurants in shipping containers).

pluralistic.net/2020/05/18/cod…

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To get there, it needs to convince consumers - that's us - to reach for Doordash first whenever we want something delivered.

To get there, it needs to be REALLY cheap - money-losingly cheap - offering bargains that we'd be idiots to pass up.

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There's two ways that Doordash can be cheaper than everyone else. The first is to subsidize each sale, using its investors' cash to make up the shortfall. These investors buy into Doordash because they know that the money-losing period is a prelude to a profitable monopoly.

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The second way Doordash keeps prices low is by violating labor law, misclassifying its workers as "independent contractors" so that it can pay sub-minimum wages and skip out on obligations like health care and pensions.

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This labor exploitation is at the heart of every app-based gig business, and as you might expect, companies that are willing to cheat their workers in one way are willing to cheat them in other ways, too. Doordash is no exception.

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Remember, Doordash pays its workers so little that they often lose money on deliveries, unless we opt for a tip that's large enough to make the difference. Doordash knows this, but it doesn't want its customers to know it.

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If Doordash customers understood that the true price of the delivery included a tip that doubled or tripled the delivery fee, no one would use the service and it would collapse before it could rig the market to make real businesses dependent on it.

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This presents a dilemma for Doordash. If workers are allowed to choose to skip unprofitable deliveries (as any "independent contractor" would) then its customers will quit the service and it will not attain a monopoly and its investors will lose everything.

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To get workers to "agree" to unprofitable deliveries, Doordash had to figure out how to coerce or trick them. For a time, it simply bait-and-switched workers, paying a premium for drivers when they started, then reducing their wages in the hopes they wouldn't notice.

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But Dashers aren't stupid. They organized the #declinenow movement, in which all the drivers in a region would decline any unprofitable delivery, knowing that the app would steadily increase the delivery fee they'd earn when this happened.

pluralistic.net/2021/04/07/cru…

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But Doordash had another tactic - it turned its app into a rigged casino game.

Customers who place an order with Doordash specify the tip BEFORE the delivery, so Doordash always knows what the total tip amount will be.

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But Doordash hid that information from drivers. It would only show them PART of the tip (as in, "You will earn at least $3 in tips on this run, but the true total may be much higher"). This turned deliveries into a slot machine where the house controlled every spin.

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Here's the thing. Doordash calls itself a tech company, but it's not - it's just a piecework sweatshop draped in the trappings of tech to dazzle investors and regulators.

And because it's not a tech company, it was really bad at rigging the odds on its slot-machines.

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It turned out that the dispatch messages that Doordash sent to drivers had the full amount of the tip in them. Doordash just programmed the driver app not to display this information.

But the app runs on the drivers' phones. If your phone knows something, you can learn it.

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So Dashers started installing Para, an app that simply sniffed the full tip amount from dispatch messages and displayed it, letting drivers choose between unprofitable and profitable runs.

entrecourier.com/delivery/deliv…

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So Doordash changed its data-model so that Para stopped working. Rather than admit that it did this so that it could coerce workers into losing money on the job, it insisted that it was trying to protect customer privacy.

npr.org/2021/07/31/102…

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Doordash falsely claimed that Para was "scraping" customer data (not that there's anything wrong with scraping per se), and bruited about a lot of FUD, hinting that Para could steal drivers' banking details and SSNs.

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As I write in my latest article for @EFF's Deeplinks blog, Doordash didn't invent this kind of #privacywashing, which is when a company blames its own misdeeds on incoherent privacy concerns.

eff.org/deeplinks/2021…

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Everyone loves getting in on privacywashing! Think of Facebook's idiotic lie that it shut down independent researchers who were exposing paid disinformation on the platform because they were putting user privacy at risk.

pluralistic.net/2021/08/05/com…

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It's obvious that Facebook's corporate management cannot be trusted to make good privacy decisions on our behalf. Neither can Doordash management, who leak our info on the reg:

help.doordash.com/dashers/s/door…

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Corporations seize on any pretense to block interoperability, because they know that if third parties can plug into their tech, it makes it harder to sustain exploitative practices that harm users, workers and suppliers.

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But when they make privacy noises, they never go to the obvious conclusion, namely, that our privacy should be safeguarded by democratically accountable laws, not corporate fiat:

eff.org/wp/interoperab…

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In a world where an app is your boss, labor rights become indistinguishable from tech rights. Seize the means of computation! And all solidarity to Dashers, who continue to organize against their exploitative employer:

reddit.com/r/doordash/com…

eof/

ETA - If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-…