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Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

#51

Post by after_care »

bagacrap wrote: post #13
imgabe wrote: post #9

Just do away with tips. It's a terrible and stupid system. If you want to do it as a customer, go ahead, but it should never be considered as part of the employee's compensation. If people aren't willing to do the job for the hourly wage alone with no tips, raise the wage until they are.

In the service industry there's a big difference between doing a job and doing a job /well/. Doing a job well is incentivized by tips.

What exactly is the difference between driving and driving well? As far as I’m concerned it’s a binary, either the package arrived or it didn’t.

Re: Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

#52

Post by trowawee »

peteretep wrote: post #15
jdavis703 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not considered a big crime because crime is largely a social construct. For example the news is happy to hype stories about recurring car break ins, but is then quiet about wage theft and other white collar crimes.

> the news is happy to hype stories about recurring car break ins, but is then quiet about wage theft That's clearly untrue, given the story we're talking about here.

Wage theft comprises, by some estimates, about 75% of all theft in the United States each year[1]. A brief perusal of television news or newspapers in any city in this country will make it immediately apparent that the crime that corporate media likes to focus on is very much not wage theft.

[1]: https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-fo...

Re: Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

#53

Post by lettergram »

imgabe wrote: post #9

Just do away with tips. It's a terrible and stupid system. If you want to do it as a customer, go ahead, but it should never be considered as part of the employee's compensation. If people aren't willing to do the job for the hourly wage alone with no tips, raise the wage until they are.

I don’t think you’ve worked a job where you got tipped, have you?

It’s actually one of the few ways people can make a lot of money for doing a good job. What you describe punishes hard work, the people getting tips would hate it.

Re: Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

#54

Post by peteretep »

MattGaiser wrote: post #27
peteretep wrote: post #3

> The FTC alleges Amazon changed the way it paid drivers in late 2016, lowering the hourly rate and then used customer tips to make up the difference. Amazon continued to tell drivers they were receiving all of their tips, even after receiving hundreds of complaints from drivers, the agency said. How is this not simply theft? Why does this attract civil charges and not criminal ones?

Because they were receiving all their tips. They were not receiving the same pay as before. I suspect they played with words to make people think one thing instead of another.

> they played with words to make people think one thing instead of another

Is that not essentially the definition of fraud though? That they’re being forced to pay it back seems like their “interpretation” here was dead off — they lost the case, right?

Re: Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

#55

Post by vrc »

jimmaswell wrote: post #37
aledalgrande wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then how comes you can get exceptional service in countries where there's no tips?

There is no culture of customer service at all in Europe from what I've heard, with apathetic to downright rude waitstaff being the norm. There's a chance it wouldn't be that way if there were tips.

IME it’s not “no customer service” as much as “less customer service” in many of the non-tip places. The staff checks on you less often and you sometimes have to actively flag them down or end up waiting for quite a while.

For an American who is used to the standard “Drink? —> Order —> Refill —> How’s everything? —> Refill —> Anything else? Dessert? Just the check?” cadence to dining it is strange and may seem like the service is more rude, though I’ve heard from folks unfamiliar with the American style that it’s overbearing, high pressure, and feels like you’re being hustled through the dining process.

Re: Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

#56

Post by xirbeosbwo1234 »

imgabe wrote: post #9

Just do away with tips. It's a terrible and stupid system. If you want to do it as a customer, go ahead, but it should never be considered as part of the employee's compensation. If people aren't willing to do the job for the hourly wage alone with no tips, raise the wage until they are.

I'm kind of intrigued by the opposite idea: extend the system of tips to everything. I'd gladly add a tip to many things I buy if I knew that it would go entirely to the workers and not one penny would go to the owners, managers, or executives.

Tips are a kind of direct income redistribution. If I think someone deserves more money, I can directly give it to them. There's no middleman, no politics, and no stigma about charity.

Re: Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

#57

Post by peteretep »

eli wrote: post #36
peteretep wrote: post #2

> (Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post) Maybe it's only a veneer of independence, but I like that WashPo is reporting on this.

Jeff Bezos isn't reviewing or approving articles in the Washington Post. It's as independent from its ownership as any media organization.

> It's as independent from its ownership as any media organization

You forgot the words “should be” at the end there; most media organisations are very far from editorially independent from their owners.

Re: Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

#58

Post by chillwaves »

jimmaswell wrote: post #33
imgabe wrote: post #9

Just do away with tips. It's a terrible and stupid system. If you want to do it as a customer, go ahead, but it should never be considered as part of the employee's compensation. If people aren't willing to do the job for the hourly wage alone with no tips, raise the wage until they are.

Tips: -Incentivize doing your job. I don't expect anything crazy and give 20% as long as you did the baseline properly. If you can't be assed to read or follow a two sentence delivery instruction that says how to find me then I'm not rewarding that. -Result in taking home much more money than otherwise in many cases, else the company still has to make up the difference to minimum wage but that almost never happens in…

What about the argument that lets people in the higher income bracket have greater control on whether the lower wage workers will be able to afford rent that month based on their own whims?

Re: Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

#59

Post by trowawee »

jimmaswell wrote: post #49
aledalgrande wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good sir, don't believe what you "have heard". Go to Europe and sit down at a Michelin starred restaurant in Italy. Then you will learn what exceptional service means.

A Michelin starred restaurant is one thing but what about the average place?

My wife and I spent most of 2019 traveling through Europe on a mix of backpacking and remote work, and while there was an adaptation period - American servers interact more with the customer, altho after Europe, it frequently feels pushy and overbearing - the service was, on average, pretty good. Much like in the US, there were places where the service was phenomenal, places where it was average, places where it sucked. There was no common denominator (again, exactly like the US).

This argument always feels weird to me, because most customer-facing jobs in the US aren’t tipped, and most of the people working in them still work hard and try to do a reasonably good job.

Re: Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

#60

Post by maxerickson »

BeetleB wrote: post #44
peteretep wrote: post #3

> The FTC alleges Amazon changed the way it paid drivers in late 2016, lowering the hourly rate and then used customer tips to make up the difference. Amazon continued to tell drivers they were receiving all of their tips, even after receiving hundreds of complaints from drivers, the agency said. How is this not simply theft? Why does this attract civil charges and not criminal ones?

Not arguing one way or other, but for many, say, restaurant workers, this practice is the norm in states that allow it (I believe that would be most states). The amount the owner is required to pay a worker is pretty low, as long as they have enough tips to hit the standard minimum wage.

The FTC press release reads like they stated a wage+all the tips and then didn't disclose that they were getting a lower wage+all the tips.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2021/02/amazo...

In a typical restaurant job, the stated wage is the legal minimum for a tipped role, and then (in theory anyway), the restaurant is required to ensure that the employee receives the normal minimum wage if they don't get tipped enough to average at least that much.

So the difference seems to be that Amazon said they'd pay a certain amount and then paid less than that.

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