After New York City enacted minimum pay rate laws for food delivery workers, DoorDash and Uber Eats changed the way tipping options appeared on its app — making it so tipping was not available until after a customer checks out. DoorDash claimed this would somehow “balance the impact” of new fees that it was charging customers. This had an obvious impact: customers would see a total at checkout, including the new fees, and assume it included a gratuity. They had to take an extra step to come back and tip after checkout–making it less likely they would do so.
This summer, the City enacted a law to address this run-around to hide the impact of the added fees, requiring the tipping option to be showed pre-checkout, as it previously had been and is done in other locations. Yesterday, DoorDash and Uber Eats sued, seeking a preliminary injunction, and arguing that the law violates the New York and U.S. Constitutions as compelled speech, unconstitutional retaliation for their changed practices, a regulatory taking, violative of due process because it “provides preferential economic treatment to delivery workers at the direct expense
of [the large corporations suing],” vague, and in excess of the City’s powers. The kitchen- In a Jabberwocky-esque argument, DoorDash has framed the lawsuit as fighting for affordability, claiming that “a forced solicitation of a tip may as well be a tax” that “make[s] life more expensive for New Yorkers.” Presumably, the workers who risk their lives bicycling around New York delivering food are not the New Yorkers DoorDash refers to. And of course, this assumes that New Yorkers want to tip but were previously misled into thinking that gratuities were included.
Whatever one’s thoughts on tipping may be, the arguments raised by the companies and their lawyers, taken to their logical conclusion, would have major consequences for a wide range of pro-consumer and pro-worker regulations–and are about profit, not “affordability.”
