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seattle city council
DoorDash and Uber Using Customers as Pawns to Punish Workers—Don’t Fall for It
Why Seattle’s City Council should reject calls to repeal or weaken PAY UP! policies protecting app-based workers.
Mar 28, 2024
A mere two months after a series of new protections for certain app-based workers in Seattle took effect, corporations like DoorDash and Uber Eats that had opposed them are trying to destroy them another way: by charging new service fees in order to tank consumer demand and available work.
In doing so, these companies manipulate more than just the market. They orchestrate a political backlash in which they seek consumers and workers to join them in denouncing the law as the culprit and clamoring for its repeal. It’s a tactic from a well-worn playbook.
As Seattle’s City Council recently recognized in passing the minimum pay law, these corporations “often pay app-based workers subminimum wages despite the promise of good wages, flexibility, and accessibility.” Moreover, these digital labor platforms rely disproportionately on Black and Latinx workers to provide the services they offer. Again, the City Council astutely recognized that such workers “face unique barriers to economic security and disproportionately must accept low-wage, unsafe, and insecure working conditions.” Black and Latinx workers are “disproportionately deprived of core employee protections” because the corporations treat them as independent contractors.
The new policies did not require DoorDash, Uber Eats, or any other company to increase service fees instead of ensuring that their workers benefit.
The Seattle City Council wisely sought to tackle and reverse these unfair and inequitable conditions. It declared that: “the City intends to address the inequities of app-based work by ensuring that such workers earn at least the city’s minimum wage plus reasonable expenses, receive transparent information on job offers and pay, and exercise the flexibility promised by network companies.”
Policy changes take time to have impact. Yet the City Council is already facing pressure from these corporations to reverse policies that they committed to just recently.
That’s because these corporations have launched one of their favorite strategies: use their control of the apps to bamboozle consumers, workers, and even elected officials into thinking that workplace protections are too costly and unworkable. In New York City, for example, after a new pay standard for app-based delivery workers took effect, “the companies wasted no time in restricting workers’ access to their platforms and discouraging tips.” Such tactics are designed to undermine support for the new protections.
App-based delivery companies are imitating the corporate tactics Uber and Lyft have used against ridehail drivers. Although Seattle’s city laws can’t touch ridehail driver conditions after the corporations pushed through a problematic preemption policy, recent analysis of that industry shows the need to drill down on the true causes and impacts of price increases. Uber and Lyft raised fares substantially more in Chicago—a city without a pay standard for app-based drivers—than in New York City, which enacted a relatively robust pay standard. If corporate claims that pay increases necessarily make rides prohibitively expensive were true, New York’s riders would have seen the more drastic increases.
Given these predictable tactics, perhaps it is no surprise that Seattle’s app-based workers are still struggling, at the mercy of corporate greed and gamesmanship. They log on and make themselves available for work, only to find there is suddenly little work to be had. It’s easy to see why many would blame the new laws, but the new policies did not require DoorDash, Uber Eats, or any other company to increase service fees instead of ensuring that their workers benefit.
The likely culprit isn’t the new protections, and the City Council should not be fooled. Rather than caving to corporate demands that reduce pay for disproportionately Black and immigrant workers who can least afford it, the council should demand data from the corporations to conduct rigorous, neutral research on its true impacts. For their part, the corporations that insist that new protections are the problem should be eager to turn over the data that will prove their case. But their one-sided and self-interested claims about what their own corporate-backed research shows should be rejected. And without evidence, the council should not fall victim to this play.
All eyes are on Seattle. Elected officials must be clear eyed about what is happening and demand answers. Corporate-sponsored policies that give the companies even more control will only undermine and exacerbate the race and income inequalities that the council sought to address. Rather, councilmembers should look to the Minneapolis example, and reject corporate efforts to scapegoat policies at the expense of the populations those policies were designed to protect and benefit. Stay the course.
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Seattle Becomes First US City to Ban Caste Discrimination With Kshama Sawant Ordinance
The Socialist Alternative Seattle Councilmember stressed that "caste discrimination doesn't only take place in other countries" and said she hopes the new law will become a "beacon" for other cities to follow.
Feb 22, 2023
The Seattle City Council voted Tuesday for the first U.S. ban on caste-based discrimination, a move the measure's socialist sponsor hopes will inspire similar legislation nationwide.
The council voted 6-1 in favor of an ordinance by District 3 Councilmember Kshama Sawant of the Socialist Alternative party that adds caste as a protected class to a long list that includes age, race, religion, gender identity, national origin, immigration status, disability, and military status.
Caste discrimination will now be banned in fields including employment, housing, and public accommodation. People experiencing caste-based discrimination will also be able to file official complaints.
Not only is it the first such law in the U.S., it's the first in the world outside South Asia.
"This bill is not technically complicated, it's a very simple question: Should discrimination based on caste be allowed to continue in Seattle?" Sawant said in a packed City Hall before Tuesday's vote.
\u201cIt\u2019s official: our movement has WON a historic, first-in-the-nation ban on caste discrimination in Seattle! Now we need to build a movement to spread this victory around the country \u270a\u201d— Kshama Sawant (@Kshama Sawant) 1677025300
Sawant, who is Indian-American, called the measure "profound and historic" and expressed hope that it will serve as a "beacon" for other cities to follow.
"If... you marched in the Black Lives Matter movement or you desire to live in a society free of racism, racial discrimination, sexism, or misogyny, then you should be paying attention," she toldCNN before the vote. "Because while caste oppression or discrimination does not affect all Americans, the way it manifests itself is no different than other types of oppression under capitalism."
Emotions and tensions ran high in City Hall before, during, and after the vote. Yogesh Mane, who grew up Dalit—the lowest caste—in India, wept as he heard the council's decision.
"I'm emotional because this is the first time such an ordinance has been passed anywhere in the world outside of South Asia," he told the Associated Press. "It's a historic moment."
\u201cSeattle on Tuesday banned discrimination based on caste, a division of people based on birth or descent, becoming the first US city and the first in the world outside South Asia to do so https://t.co/NjrgWGZatl\u201d— Bloomberg Quicktake (@Bloomberg Quicktake) 1677079461
The caste system, which has existed in South Asia for millennia, divides Hindus into groups including Brahmins (priests and teachers); Kshatriyas (rulers and warriors); Vaishyas (farmers, merchants, and traders); Shudras (laborers); and Dalits (street and latrine cleaners).
Although India's constitution, whose drafting was led by the Dalit scholar Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, officially banned caste-based discrimination, those on the lower rungs—especially the Dalits—continue to suffer endemic discrimination and frequent violence. Such bigotry has been inflamed by the rise of Hindu nationalism in recent decades, and during the tenure of right-wing Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Advocates of the ordinance in Washington state's largest city stressed that caste-based bigotry is by no means limited to South Asia.
"Caste discrimination doesn't only take place in other countries," Sawant—who grew up in a middle-class Brahmin family in Mumbai—said in a statement announcing the introduction of her bill. "It is faced by South Asian-American and other immigrant working people in their workplaces, including in the tech sector, in Seattle and in cities around the country."
"We know that caste discrimination has been growing in the United States across many industries, including technology, construction, restaurants, and the service industry, and in domestic work," she added. "Caste discrimination is increasingly a grave contributor to workplace discrimination and bias—data from Equality Labs show that 1 in 4 caste-oppressed people faced physical and verbal assault, 1 in 3 faced education discrimination, and 2 in 3 faced workplace discrimination."
\u201cLove has won over hate as Seattle has become the first in the nation to ban caste discrimination. We have braved rape threats, death threats, disinformation, and bigotry. Thank you to the 200 organizations who stood with us! Thank you to the 30 caste oppressed civil rights\u2026\u201d— Dalit Diva (@Dalit Diva) 1677028030
Sawant continued:
Just as racism is not the result of an "inevitable" racial friction between white and Black people, caste oppression has also been maintained by the class structure of capitalist society in South Asia and now in the United States.
Beyond winning reforms such as this one, working people in our city, nationally, and internationally need to unite and build mass movements to fight for a socialist society. Because as long as an exploitative and rapacious system like capitalism exists, oppression will be endemic. The only way to end caste, racial, gender, and other oppressions is for the working class to fight for a different kind of world.
Caste-based discrimination is at the center of a case making its way through a California state court in which a former engineer at Cisco Systems says he was excluded from meetings and passed up for promotions because he is Dalit.
\u201cCaste discrimination inside tech companies is a huge problem (as I reported in 2020: \nhttps://t.co/iIxy6SSzmZ) \n\nGiven that Seattle is home to Microsoft and Amazon, the city becoming the first in the US to ban caste discrimination is a huge move.....\n\nhttps://t.co/iupKhiOMnM\u201d— David Gilbert (@David Gilbert) 1677072331
One Seattle-area tech worker, who gave only the name Maya for fear of retaliation, toldTheSeattle Times that she has been the target of workplace caste discrimination because she is Dalit. Maya said her manager rebuffed an offer to volunteer for a work project, telling her, "You better not touch the project because you're ill-fated."
"It might not sound like something major, but for us, it completely resonates with the caste and untouchability because not touching is what all of the dominant-caste people have made rules around for so long," Maya explained. "That's why we are called untouchables. We're not supposed to touch anything or anyone."
"Caste is an evil that has been practiced for more than 3,000 years now," she added. "We carry the genetic trauma of caste for such a long time already. But if we don't have caste protections, then this is going to affect even the next generations."
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