Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

#71

Post by dealforager » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 5:01 AM UTC

lettergram wrote: post #53

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.

Most of the information I've read about this says that tips do not correlate with job performance. Instead, things like race, sex, attractiveness, and other things have a bigger impact. I've even caught myself doing this, where I'll realize after the fact that the only reason I tipped extra was because I noticed the worker was either a very attractive woman/man. It's not even sexual attraction since I'm not attracted to men. My guess is that I'm more likely to notice good service if I first notice the server, which happens more when they are attractive.

Re: Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

#72

Post by LordAtlas » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 5:02 AM UTC

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.

In the USA. Large parts of the world do just fine without 15-20% tips being the norm and instead just getting paid a reasonable wage.

Re: Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

#73

Post by trowawee » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 5:02 AM UTC

imgabe wrote: post #66

lettergram wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most jobs don't have tips. People working in them still manage to do a good job and many of them make a lot more than people in tipped jobs do.

My PM doesn’t tip me when I complete a ticket quickly; I don’t tip QA when they catch a bug in my code; the on-call engineer doesn’t tip me when some docs I wrote save them a few hours of time fixing an issue I saw during my last on-call rotation. And yet! The company seems to keep making money and doing well, and we all seem to like each other (mostly, except for that one guy, but he doesn’t like anyone).

Re: Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

#74

Post by xirbeosbwo1234 » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 5:03 AM UTC

siquick wrote: post #61

xirbeosbwo1234 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 abou…

This should never ever be a thing. Buyers already pay enough tax as it is without another stealth tax that employers can take advantage of.

It's something I wish I could do. It's not a system I would know how to implement. I certainly agree that the existing system of tipping doesn't work very well.

Re: Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

#75

Post by Ericson2314 » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 5:05 AM UTC

lettergram wrote: post #53

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.

What about the customers just in a bad mood taking it out on you? What about the restaurants that pay sub-minimimum wage before tips? (basically a tax dodge.)

I'm not saying all bonus-based comp is bad, but it's rather out of place for nominally unskilled labor especially when it is a huge portion of total comp.

The fact of the matter is the economics of much restaurant work it totally wack.

I look forward to a cyberchill future of near-fully-automated cheaper-than-cooking-at-home not-cooked-to-order restaurants with an owner-masterchef as the only human in the operations.

Re: Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

#76

Post by alextheparrot » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 5:05 AM UTC

sellyme wrote: post #50

Noos wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um..medium hourly income in the USA is $21 an hour or so. I live in a decently expensive state and skilled trades, managers, and various lower-tier technical people make $30 an hour, and that's double the state's upcoming minimum wage. I really don't see how you pay them that much.

> I really don't see how you pay them that much. But they're apparently already getting paid that much! Either people are drastically misrepresenting how much waitstaff take home in tips, or there's enough money in the economy to pay them that much.

It is a difference in who decides how much they’re paid. In a traditional business their pay is at the discretion of the business and thus in competition with what could be the business’s profits. Tips are inaccessible to the business, so they get paid more closely to what consumers are ok with paying. I’m probably paying more too because of being guilted into feeling like I must tip x% because I’m directly responsible for the person’s wages.

These two points mean there’s no guarantee a tipped wage would convert 1:1 into an hourly wage if we simply removed tipping, even if the value provided by the tipped employee stays constant.

Re: Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

#77

Post by Gibbon1 » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 5:05 AM UTC

monster_group wrote: post #25

bagacrap wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the legal fees and reputational damage make it not exactly free

Still a lot better than going to prison for multiple years which is what common man would face for stealing.

I've thought for a long time wage theft should be criminal like every other type of theft. And the law should require 1 day in prison for every $10,000 stolen. Steal $62M in tips should mean a bunch of people go to prison for $61.7M/ $10,000 = 6170 days or 17 years.

Re: Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

#78

Post by Noos » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 5:06 AM UTC

imgabe wrote: post #19

bagacrap wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can also incentivize people by firing them when they don't do the job well, as every other industry does. Why are you even hiring people who aren't going to do the job well? What kind of crappy attitude is that? "I know you hired me and you're paying me and I'm here to do this job, but I'm going to do it really poorly unless you pay me extra"

the problem with retail specifically is that you are never paying enough to make that a credible threat. If anything, your staff might just turnover every two years naturally, especially if it's only a part time job. Most retail in an area either is lifer staff or constant churn; in a particularly bad job I had, we turned over entire staff almost in a year.

Re: Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

#79

Post by neilv » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 5:07 AM UTC

One of the few things in 2020 that I felt good about was being able to tip the Amazon Fresh delivery drivers.

Now I hear that those essential workers, who helped save me and my neighbors from Covid, were getting cheated out of tips, intentionally, by higher-ups at Amazon.

And I'm guessing the money meant a lot more to someone who's delivering groceries in a pandemic, than it does to a trillion-dollar corporation. And presumably the higher-ups knew that.

Making the drivers whole, and expressing contrition, seems like repaying maybe 10-fold the amount stolen, plus interest, is a start.

That's from the corporate side, but corrective action shouldn't stop there. Are we going to see a criminal investigation, and possible charges against individuals who knew what was going on, yet didn't correct or report it?

Re: Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

#80

Post by throwawaysea » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 5:07 AM UTC

naebother wrote: post #7

Always tip cash. > Amazon agreed to pay the regulator $61.7 million, the amount the FTC claims the company shorted its drivers in tips over a 2½ year period. Can the common man also get this kind of generous treatment from the law - just pay back what you stole and move on?

There really should be an additional fine to deter this type of practice, but at least they had to pay it back. I half expected a fine that was smaller than what they stole.

Another victim here is the tipper. Both the tipper and the driver were deprived of their money. Even if Amazon is returning it now, they got an interest free loan of $62M all this time. And the other two parties didn’t have this money for their own use, when time may have been a factor.