Collective bargaining via app.
Workers have long tried to outwit the gig platforms, with strategies such as using apps from multiple companies. Now, an increasingly popular tactic is declining cheap rides or orders to boost pay.
In October 2019, two DoorDash drivers started a #DeclineNow Facebook group urging members to reject any delivery that doesn’t pay a minimum of $7, Bloomberg reported. The group now has at least 32,000 members.
Willy Solis, a gig worker based in Denton, Texas and who is part of the group, has taken it a step further. Since March, he has been using third-party apps to automatically decline cheap fares, once declining 122 orders in a day. Solis, who drives about 35 hours a week, sets the minimum pay, before tips, on the third-party apps at $6 an hour. Solis says he has seen his average earnings increase 45% to 55% each day after using this tactic.
“To better economic conditions is to decline orders,” he told Quartz. “The orders we get—the large majority is way below minimum wage and would result in non-sustainable living wage if we accepted all those orders.”
Solis says the DoorDash movement has inspired other gig platform workers. In the Facebook group Instacart Shoppers, with over 17,000 members, a post this week reminded drivers not to accept low-paying batches.
Declining rides is “growing in its movement [and is] more effective than trying to unionize at this time,” says Solis. Declining riders also gives drivers more control over what orders they want to pursue.
Unionization efforts in the US have been slow to gain traction. In New York, Uber and Lyft are working with labor unions to develop legislation that would give gig workers a path to unionization, while keeping workers classified as independent contractors. Labor advocates say it could carve the gig companies out of the labor movement’s biggest goal, which is to get Congress to enact the Protect the Rights to Organize (PRO) Act, a bill that would extend federal bargaining rights to app-based workers.