The latest effort by the City Council to micromanage the food delivery industry is off-base. Councilmember Shaun Abreu is introducing measures that would force app-based food delivery companies to put tip options prior to checkout and require a minimum gratuity suggestion of 10% of an order’s cost.
The move is in response to the decision of Grubhub, UberEats, DoorDash and others to either reduce the suggested tip amounts or put tips at the end of the transaction after recent wage hikes for delivery drivers. The many thousands of other workers around the city who rely on tips received post-transaction — at restaurants, coffee shops, bars and other hospitality-sector jobs — must be left scratching their heads at the lack of similar concern for them.
Tips have traditionally been a gratuity for the performance of a job well done.
We understand that we’ve long arrived at a place where they’re really a subsidization of wages, and by and large we think it’s almost always appropriate and responsible to tip for services like food delivery. Adding a pre-selected 10% or more tip at the front-end of a transaction turns it into something more like a fee disguised as a tip.
The Council has, of course, already increased wages for delivery workers to more than the state minimum wage after a successful organizing effort by the deliveristas themselves, an effort which we’ve commended. That effectively makes delivery workers non-tipped workers, along with the thousands of other NYC wage-earners for whom tips are a bonus but not a wage supplement.
Still, their status as independent contractors knocks their real compensation back down. If the Council believes that deliverista wages remain too low and wants to explore further increases, eliminate tipping in the service sector more generally, require delivery apps to contribute to worker health and unemployment funds, or whatever else, it’s free to broach all those conversations on their own merits. But this bill attempts to fix something that the Council itself caused.
In the past few years, food delivery has quickly become not only relatively ubiquitous but has been quite underpaid and one of the most dangerous jobs in the city, even as it’s provided a financial lifeline for a population of primarily immigrants. We’re glad that policymakers have taken action to make things better, and are not at all suggesting that it’s not worth it to help these workers. Yet piling on another effective wage increase shoe-horned-in through this tipping measure seems disingenuous.
More broadly, this marks another prong in the legislative body’s period of sustained attention on the working condition of delivery workers, when the concern might be better spread around to workers of all stripes. As it stands, we get the New York City Council effectively seeking to micromanage the operations of one industry while all but ignoring many more. Better to set sensical pay and labor standards across the board and perhaps build in some industry-specific requirements instead of playing whack-a-mole with the delivery apps.
What’s next, will the Council legislate how app-based menus should look, with higher-priced items shown first to juice worker earnings? What routes delivery cyclists should take? What cuisines they can carry? Let’s leave the little details aside and have a holistic conversation about how to do right by the city’s service workers.
