What's silly in this case is that (as others have pointed out) the new algorithm seems to have been reasonably equitable, with a genuine redistribution of payments, rather than just a cut overall. Shipt could have avoided this whole situation with a straightforward explanation of the changes, together with a few examples of the cases/jobs in which people would earn more or less.

I work for a salary, which is fully transparent in the sense that I know what my next paycheck will be to the penny. (It’s not transparent in how it’s set, but it is week-to-week.) If my employer started paying me based on effort, and didn’t tell me what constituted effort, not only would I be pissed off but that would be completely illegal.

I’m not suggesting that this change is or should be illegal. But if it happened to me I’d find it extremely unfair.

If Shipt is actually trying to incentivize better performance, it seems the best way is to be completely transparent about the rewards algorithm. "Short high-value trips are now somewhat de-rated, and trips requiring more effort now have improved rewards, specifically ..." or whatever.

This "communications team" approach did everyone a disservice if Shipt mgt were really trying to improve results.

OTOH, if the actual goal was to screw workers harder, they accomplished that, as here ate arguments on HN about how this could be good for the workers, thus successfully obfuscating the goal of screw-the-workers.

By what mechanism do you suggest the worker-screwing is happening here?

cutting costs is not "screwing workers". cutting costs is key to acting in a competitive market.

I have thought about this topic for a while at the time that I worked with Law data (e.g. Family Law and Military Law), and I just came to the conclusion that several societal institutions and it's agents are inherently intransparent, even in situations where some "illusionist transparency" (there's transparency, but the magician deviates your attention to another side) is given (e.g. judiciary system, under-the-table political agreements, etc.).

That's one of the reasons I would like to have a more algorithmic society with human in the loop calling the final shots and placing the rationale on top. An algorithm will have human and institutional biases but in some sort, you can explain part of it and fine-tune it; a human making the final call on top of a given option would need to explain and rationally explain its decision. At best a human actor will use logic and make the right call, at worst it will transparently expose the biases of the individual.

I will admit that it is an interesting idea. I am not sure it would work well as a lot of the power ( and pressure to adjust as needed ) suddenly would move to the fine-tuning portion of the process to ensure human at the top can approve 'right' decisions. I am going to get my coffee now.

Let’s re-audit the algorithm regularly; say, perhaps, a central committee revisits and revises the plan every 5 years?

But isn’t that what the rule of law is supposed to be? A set of written rules with judges at the top to interpret or moderate them when all else fails.

The problem is that, for a variety of complex reasons, the rules are not applied evenly, and sometimes only enforced opportunistically.

So I don’t see how an algorithmic society is any different from today’s society. The problem is not the ability to operate algorithmically, which we already have, but in determining what the rules should be, how they should be enforced, what the penalties should be, who pays for what, and, perhaps most importantly, how to avoid capture of the algorithmic process by special interests.

None of these problems go away with an algorithmic approach, less so if there is a judge sitting on top who can make adjustments.

To who? What you describe does not seem much different than the representation governments most of us here are accustomed to, other than the algorithm eases some day-to-day work required of the constituents. Already nobody cares, and no doubt would care even less if they could let an algorithm let them be even less involved.

It feels to me like the problem wasn't the change. For all we know, the change was a net good thing. The bad thing was the context in which the change occurred.

We already do; uncertainty is fundamental at all levels.

That statement is wrong either way. Looking at the graph, ~22% got a >10% cut while ~36% got a >10% raise. Overall ~43% got a cut while ~57% got a raise. And if there’s any doubt, later on they dropped the “at least 10% less” qualifier for the 40% figure in text:

> But we felt that it was important to shine a light on those 40 percent of workers who had gotten an unannounced pay cut through a black box transition.

Can’t believe they (accidentally? intentionally?) screwed up the very first concrete figure given in the article. Guess what, discussion is now based on the wrong figure.

Also, the y-axis of the plot is labeled “number of workers” when it should be “percentage of participating workers”, unless they had exactly 100 participants (they say they had 200+). Lousy presentation.

I’m all for transparency, obviously.

Edit: In addition, since participation is entirely voluntary, common sense tells me that the data they gather should skew more negative, since people negatively affected are much more likely to participate.

that's not to say sharing wages is bad. this can still provide upward pressure on said wages. but the people who participate in the beginning are likely from the lower end of the distribution.

[0] websites like levels.fyi seem to consistently skew low when estimating higher percentiles

> For the shoppers who were being paid under the new algorithm, we found that 40 percent of workers were earning more than 10 percent less than they would have under the old algorithm. What’s more, looking at data from all geographic regions, we found that about one-third of workers were earning less than their state’s minimum wage.

> It wasn’t a clear case of wage theft, because 60 percent of workers were making about the same or slightly more under the new scheme. But we felt that it was important to shine a light on those 40 percent of workers who had gotten an unannounced pay cut through a black box transition.

Those paragraphs are then literally followed by a graph showing the conservation of fees overall but the redistribution of wages to other workers.

Seems to me that workers started cherry picking assignments leaving a bulk of orders which could not be realised, so they decided to (1) change the algorithm to avoid this, and (2) not publish it so it couldn't be gamed as easily.

> It wasn’t a clear case of wage theft, because 60 percent of workers were making about the same or slightly more under the new scheme.

Your statement that "some 30+% are getting at least 10% more" assumes that there is no wage theft - which is not cut in stone.

Sometimes that goes afoul when it's ruled that they put requirements that are only valid for employees on contractors.

I don't follow this? Is this predicated on the fact that gig corps can choose not to work with contractors that don't meet their criteria? If so, how is this different from only using lumber yards that consistently meet your expectations?

The implication of the parent poster seems to be that there are legal requirements regarding contractors and legal requirements regarding employees but gig corps would prefer to treat their workers as one or the other class depending on which is to their benefit - which would be against the law because of the aforementioned concept "legal requirements".

- requiring specific dress code is non-enforceable on contractors in many places

- contractor is not required to provide specific person to fulfill the job, only a person of appropriate qualifications (it's valid for there to be a check on those qualifications)

- in UK case, contractor might be asked to prove that they have a substitute to work in their place!

- [Poland, possibly other] having only one client is not illegal, but can be grounds for investigations and if it's your only client where you work for equivalent of full-time job, it will be evidence for tax fraud

- You can not enforce working hours on contractors in most jurisdiction, only specific deliverables (taking part of work meetings is deliverable, requiring availability in general of specific person at specific times can be grounds for reclassification)

- above is often linked with "gig economy" - rules regarding "contractors" needing to pick up available jobs etc. are often considered illegal skirting of employment law.

As sibling comment mentioned, more is available from your local (too) friendly search engine. And employment lawyers and HR specialists.

There is a way of calculating the pay for a job. It is predictable. Publish the algorithm. Want to change it? Great. Update the documentation and then publish that. The workers should be able to calculate exactly what they are owed. They can decide to leave or stay.

Only in America are people deflecting by bringing up the employment status of people when the issue is a lack of transparency designed to allow wage theft.

You’re arguing that it’s sometimes legitimate to hide payment information. So I can hire someone for a job, and only I know what the job is worth. The worker just has to try it out and see if their valuation of the job is the same as my valuation?

The fact that some, maybe most, are making more money is irrelevant. The organisation can change the value of a particular job at any time and simply say “the algorithm made me do it”.

A specific user can decide whether or not to take a specific delivery with full information. Following your analogy, it'd be like using some opaque algorithm to set the offer amount when hiring for a job, which is pretty much what happens today.

1. If they can game it, they should. If that's a problem, then Shipt should fix their algorithm.

2. It's fine to data wrangle your way to an automated model for e.g. your company's growth projection or for predicting where you can best expand to find more customers. It's not okay to use it to unilaterally change pay agreements with your workers or "contractors".

3. The right of an individual to know what they're getting paid for their work outweighs any company's nebulous claim of its algorithm being a trade secret or something vague like that. Can you imagine businnesses actually operating like this? "You can't know what we'll pay you for this job, its ~~seeeecret~~. Just trust us."

From now on I'm going to pay my rent according to a secret algorithm of my own devising and my landlord will just have to hope I'm generous this month. I can't have him gaming the lease agreement by only providing the things it says!

Why not? The contractors know before directly accepting a contract it's value, they can choose to not accept it if they think they're being underpaid?

Except this is how things work at basically all companies? Compensation decisions are secret and only known at offer time, I don't think I've worked for a single company where the specific executive decision reasoning for an offer is given.

"Surely in a hotly competitive market" there is no need to hypothesise about what "surely" would happen according to some wishful thinking. We know from countless past observation exactly what happens in any market of low skill low investment labor, wages go straight to the level of the most desperate willing to be slaves and make nothing at all, because there always are enough of those for everyone else to take advantage of, and having no money they have no power to demand better. They can't afford lawyers and ad campaigns and lobbyists and politicians, and they can't afford to strike, and that same wonderful magic market means there is no one better to work for, all employers are essentially the same. Unions and strikes do exist, some places where they are allowed to, and it's always a big news story and a miracle when they actually accomplish even 10% of what they needed to once in a blue moon.

Because there are not only always people willing to work for net-nothing, there are actually enough people willing to work for net negative, because they manage to survive in various ways ranging from charity to theft. Mooching off someone else to live without rent or having to buy food, under the table jobs, minor crime, obviously health insurance is completely out of the question. As long as those exist, the market says that this work is worth this cost. The market doesn't know or care how that happens.

Unfair is a funny word to try to apply to the power-wielding benefit-collecting side of this dynamic.

From a game-theoretic perspective in a gig marketplace you don’t want jobs that are strictly better, else sophisticated market participants (workers) will select the best ones leaving chaff - and a worse experience - for the less sophisticated participants.

What you are looking for is preference optionality, eg one Uber driver might prefer not to do very long trips, another might prefer it, and you ideally get paid fairly for either.

In this case as others have noted, it doesn’t actually sound like an unfair change. Perhaps communications could have been better though.

The company captures the consumer surplus. Generally currently we often get way more value than we pay for. We hate having that surplus taken away from us and we hate being charged what something is worth to us.

Two questions: How do we fight back? Is it unfair that we pay the amount that something is worth to us individually?

Currently think of any service you use and the value you get from it. What happens when Apple or Google start to try and capture the consumer surplus we receive?

Are there better economic theories than traditional microeconomics? Something that (a) models information asymmetry, (b) models measurement risk/variability of expectations versus actual reward, (c) doesn't assume a perfectly rational consumer or producer - instead follows what we see in the world better?

In highly competitive markets, any substantial profits get competed away, and captured by the consumer.

In monopolistic / uncompetitive markets, profits are captured by the monopolist.

Of course, this is a spectrum not a dichotomy. Last I tried to quantify this, I got numbers like 50-60% of the US economy is at least somewhat uncompetitive. But I’d like better numbers. (It’s easy to come up with examples on both sides, IMO)

However for most goods/services there is variability in multiple dimensions. And we are irrational buyers and we poorly measure our +ve/-ve utility on multiple dimensions into dollars. And we poorly choose between different options. Plus there is variation.

I would love to meet a rational consumer - their purchasing habits would be interestingly abnormal!

The only thing that seems to protect us from corporate abuse currently is the information gap - we poorly measure our preferences and lack product/service knowledge so producers struggle to measure our preferences and so they struggle to discriminate. If those information asymmetries decrease (especially if they know us better than we know ourselves) then we are in trouble.

I'll rephrase this in a way that's more straightforward and clear:

> We hate being charged every penny we could conceivably pay for a given thing.

In part because many ordinary folks believe that a fair deal is for businesses to cover the cost of R&D for the thing and the cost of getting it to us, as well as a reasonable profit to cover both expected future support and future R&D for improvements and/or new products.

And also in part because most folks can figure out what's likely to happen when every company out there demands that we pay them not just enough to cover the above, but every penny we could conceivably pay for the thing. (To spell it out: One suddenly has to make very hard choices about what one does without... likely for an uncomfortably long time. [0])

[0] If you think that this wouldn't happen, or that if it did it would be over in a matter of weeks (rather than years) remember the aphorism "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.".

People probably regard excessive profits as immoral for a variety of reasons:

There are situations where people have little choice but to accept a deal. E.g. imagine someone requiring a drowning person to agree to pay a million dollars to be rescued.

Increased profits are often "unearned" in that they don't stem from something like working harder or innovating. Encouraging innovation and hard work is one of the primary justifications given for capitalism.

Society's operation is often based on the assumption that things will be priced perfectly. E.g. no one would be able to retire if companies where able to perfectly match prices and pay.

The rich hurting the poor in order to become even more rich is considered immoral in almost all philosophies.

Gamifying peoples livelihood is the problem.

That is… exactly the point I made, when I said:

> you don’t want jobs that are strictly better

Preference optionality is widely stated to be one of the features that gig workers like about the arrangement.

The options you suggest are also valid ways of homogenizing the jobs to reduce variance.

> Gamifying peoples livelihood is the problem

To be clear Game Theory applies to all economic interactions. Mechanism Design is the branch of Game Theory pertaining to market design to achieve desired outcomes, such as “avoid adverse selection in my gig work marketplace”.

Gamification is a specific application of video game design to economic interactions, it’s unrelated to what I’m discussing. (Examples of Gamification would be gaining experience points and levels for delivery, daily checking rewards, achievement badges, etc. - the general goal in Gamification is setting up a dopamine loop to encourage repeat use of the app. Hopefully it’s clear this is not what I was talking about.)

Central planning would be if a committee decided how many rides there would be each year, regardless of demand.

Or is this attitude of “hey, it’s a long shot, but let’s give it a try and see if anybody takes the job” closer to the attitude you’d like to see? If the latter, how would you communicate that to the users?

I had an occasion a long time ago where I needed to request an Uber for a ride similar to what you’re describing. At that time, apparently the driver didn’t find out the route until they’d committed to the ride. The guy swiped to say he’d picked me up, and more or less broke down in tears when he found out where I was needing to go. He lived 40 miles in the other direction, was going off shift, and would be driving the whole 90 miles home without any prayer of a passenger to cover the time or cost. In that case I ended up giving the guy a generous amount of cash to cover the imposition, but I couldn’t bring myself to use Uber for that route in the future.

Until recently, when I had to use Uber for that route again. This time it seemed like they’d gotten much better at accommodating drivers’ preference optionality: the guy who picked me up drove over 110mph all the way to the airport. Apparently when you drive like that, especially in an EV, the more miles the better…

He explained that he could dial into the app that he preferred longer trips and trips between areas that happened to be connected by this lawless highway.

A similar (though not a break down in tears situation) - My 300 Mile Lyft Ride From Chicago to Bradford - https://whatever.scalzi.com/2019/07/23/my-300-mile-lyft-ride... ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20508238 - 186 comments)

The relevant section:

> I considered about it for a minute, and then thought, why the hell not, and scheduled the ride. The worst case scenario in this situation is that no one would take the fare, and I would be no worse off than I already was. After a few seconds, I was matched with a car, and I went out to meet the driver.

> I had a suspicion that the app might not tell the driver exactly where I was going, so when the driver — Victor — pulled up, I double-checked with him.

> “I want to be absolutely clear what you’re getting into,” I told him. “I’m asking you to drive me to Ohio.”

> “The state?” he asked.

> “Yes.”

> He thought about it for a second, consulted his own Lyft app (which hadn’t, in fact, told him the destination, just that it was more than 30 minutes away), and then looked back to me, and sort of shrugged. “I like long trips. This could be fun.” Then he popped the trunk for my luggage.

Ideally, of course, I can up my price and so on but even absent that I frequently choose Waymo or an ebike because they're more reliable.

I assure you if they had just offered a higher price, some driver would have taken it, assuming that price wasn't then too high for you to be OK with it.

A lot of companies actually underprice their stuff a little relative to the market to avoid outrage and accusations of gouging. It's easy to find these -- look for the shortages. Proper pricing prevents shortages, by definition. But people tend to get a lot more pissed off if once or twice a month, eggs cost $40/carton, than if once or twice a month, eggs have run out by the time they get to the store. The first feels like a human is out to get you, the second seems like a natural accident. Humans aren't rational economic actors.

Of course, this infuriates me as it does anyone with a semester of microeconomics.

I could see people being upset if they knew that eggs where out because some rich person bought a disproportionate number of them; it's just that normally they can't know.

I think that most people's preference for limited resources would be a low price with a limit on how many a person can purchase (which is what many stores do during shortages). It seems to me that people care more about making sure that everyone can get some eggs without being gouged than they care about avoiding shortages in aggregate.

We use Shipt regularly and it’s a bit different than the other delivery apps. I now have a collection of favorite shoppers. While jobs still go to the pool, these people have a first shot at my order. I’ve learned the general availability of my favorites and tend to place orders when I think there’s a high chance they’ll be available to shop the order.

While it’s still not me selecting an individual contractor, it’s not the randomness of other apps.

The service provides a large pool of people that ensure the service is delivered. However, I have a preference for a certain group of people to provide that service. I tip well and consistently get service from my preferred shoppers. When they don’t take it, it falls to the general pool and is picked up quickly.

I personally just care that my groceries get shopped for me. Having someone who already knows my preference is just a small perk.

I don't worry about which USPS mail carrier delivers my mail -- I know it will be consistent and good enough. I happen to know who my usual carrier is, because I work from home and she likes to say hi to cats if they are in the front window. I also know the face of the usual UPS driver and the usual FedEx driver; they aren't here 6 days a week, but often enough that I recognize them.

In none of those cases do I expect a quality change based on the driver. I expect competence, and I get it so often that the exceptions really stand out.

From the Shipt workers' perspective, they now need to worry about customers discriminating among them rather than just getting the job done.

These Shipt people, though, have to interpret your preferences and essentially act as your agent as they decide what to pick from the store shelves on your behalf. Sometimes they make decisions that you probably would have made, sometimes less so; sometimes they’re confident that you understand each other, sometimes they’re nervous and want to hassle you about each of 10 different little decision points. When you find somebody I work well with, isn’t it a positive that you get to try to keep that relationship for future transactions? Isn’t this the same dynamic underpinning virtually every in-person service, from your hair cutting human to the tradies who do work on your house to the dry cleaner?

For that matter, doesn’t it create a perverse incentive if worker doesn’t believe that trying to understand my preferences will ever pay off? That it’s a one-off game rather than an iterated series of games, and effort to excel and bring human judgment to bear is wasted because there’s no way to reward it?

Doesn’t the enshittification tend to require as a prerequisite that a platform is successful at alienating service providers from service recipients (and from each other) like that?

If anything shoud be a regulation, this feels like the one to add: platform opportunities must estimate and prominently display the estimated time to complete the task and the minimum payout after platform fees.

Remember, consumers are using platform apps like Uber because they don't trust the drivers on the other side.

Oh, I thought it was because "push button to summon car" is, like, super convenient.

I don’t understand where these complex theories about ride sharing apps come from.

People use Uber because it’s easy and it’s an app. Taxis did not have a universal app at the time.

If you talk to young Uber users, chances are they wouldn’t actually know how to call a traditional taxi if you asked. It’s either Uber or Lyft because those are the apps they’ve heard about.

Also, it’s common for drivers to work for both Uber and Lyft at different points, maybe the same time. There’s no real element of trust difference between the two options.

> Target… offered same-day delivery from local stores. Those deliveries were made by Shipt workers, who shopped for the items and drove them to customers’ doorsteps. Business was booming… and yet workers found that their paychecks had become… unpredictable. They were doing the same work they’d always done, yet their paychecks were often less than they expected.

Edit:

> On Facebook and Reddit, workers compared notes. Previously, they’d known what to expect from their pay because Shipt had a formula: It gave workers a base pay of $5 per delivery plus 7.5 percent of the total amount of the customer’s order through the app. That formula allowed workers to look at order amounts and choose jobs that were worth their time. But Shipt had changed the payment rules without alerting workers. When the company finally issued a press release about the change, it revealed only that the new pay algorithm paid workers based on “effort,” which included factors like the order amount, the estimated amount of time required for shopping, and the mileage driven.

Even convoluted ones, like commissions for sales, or shared tips, are covered by law. I do know this, as I know a number of salespeople and servers.

I suspect that the government needs to know what to tax, and obfuscated pay, means obfuscated taxes.

You're taxed on what you're paid. The government doesn't do a parallel calculation and tax you on that.

That is money that leaves the employer’s account and goes into the employee’s account (or government’s account for tax withholding).

I don’t see how this can be obfuscated.

It does seem unsporting on the company’s part to play coy about the details. I wonder what the imperative was there: to avoid squabbling with workers about what “effort” means? To reduce the chances of legal scrutiny in one of the thousands of jurisdictions they operate in? To preserve the flexibility to quietly turn the dial in their own favor in the future?

I’m reminded of how Uber caught flak over surge pricing, and ultimately dealt with that by making pricing completely opaque. Now they still might say “prices are a little higher because of the weather” if they decide to, but normally you don’t even expect to know whether your price for a given ride is based on their estimate of your desperation, their having sized you up as price-insensitive, driver supply, or what…

That's not correct, at least for "digitally-born PDFs" that were made on a computer and haven't been scanned. In that case, the PDF can be parsed directly, without OCR, to get text. That's what a tool like PyPDF2 does, for example.

I’m kind of amazed that the article has the courage to say this out loud. The New York Times or any mainstream publication would never have been so honest.

If anything they would have said some weasel words like “some ex-associates of shipt have complained that the app’s compensation system is unfair.” Rather than just blurt out the truth, which is that it’s unfair by design because the owners of the app want to maintain a certain power relationship. It’s the kind of thing that everyone knows but is not allowed to say in printed form.

It's the IEEE, (we) Engineers are known for having an aversion to bullshit, and just for straight-up having no filter. I wish more of the world worked that way.

Absolutely pathetic investigative journalism on display. This is a hit piece thinly veiled under the guise of being pro worker that fails to support the main point of algorithmic management of gig workers is worse for everyone but the corporation employing it.

If anything, they proved that shipt's algo did exactly what it was designed and reported to do, make payments more fair.

They didn't prove that. It's entirely possible the algo was skimming something off the top. It's entirely possible the algo was disproportionately rewarding some people to the detriment of others. A lot of it depends on what one thinks is "fair"... and without transparency, we can't even judge whether it is or not... which itself could be argued is unfair.

> They asked for a meeting with Shipt executives, but they never got a direct response from the company. Its statements to the media were maddeningly vague, saying only that the new payment algorithm compensated workers based on the effort required for a job, and implying that workers had the upper hand because they could "choose whether or not they want to accept an order."

> Did the protests and news coverage have an effect on worker conditions? We don’t know, and that’s disheartening.

If the app shows clearly what needs to be done (shop, order list, miles driven), and the pay the worker will earn, and asks if they want to accept, then IMO that's fine.

The business can set those offers however they like, even using a random number generator if they want, and IMO it's morally fine.

If the algorithm detects that you are likely to accept for little money and short you with lower offers compared to other users, is it still morally fine?

Ideally, there's incentive for people to collectively reach the most efficient solution through aggregated laziness and greed.

In practice, people only have so much bandwidth and shortcuts will be taken, options will be overlooked, and people will exploit or be exploited due to the blinders either put on willingly or forced on them--on top of our natural capacity for observing reality no matter how much information is provided.

Consider what risk might exist if you fear overpaying so much that you make a lowball offer yet someone feels compelled to accept. The product or service might be "done" but in a way that screws you over in the long run as well.

Trust is earned, and it flows both ways.

Anyway what is moral depends on your personal values, not the law nor how things are done, it's expected to disagree.

Platforms sometimes care—by which I mean, achieve a market position that means sellers can’t afford not to use them, then leverage that power to force lots and lots of weaker people and entities to do what they want, possibly causing higher lowest-prices in the overall market in the process, so, also hurting buyers.

At least with laws, there are clear adjudicators on the issues at hand.

Or if they get you to pay them money upfront (ie. for uniforms) on the basis of 'workers earn $Y per day', but then change the rules so some workers don't earn Y per day and don't offer a refund of the upfront payment to unhappy workers.

Time-based contracts are pretty normal. I imagine most people on the planet are on them. There are exceptions - e.g. sales commissions - but to say that workers lose on the thing that most people do requires at least some elaboration.

Which should be obvious but this is kind of the problem with enshittification where once a business feels they have a bit of a moat (like with a two sided marketplace) they will erode the service to take every advantage unless stopped by regulation. No one likes regulation because it's effectively crufty technical debt and our political system is far too slow, corrupt, or incompetent to effectively refactor it so the best we can do is either nothing and endure the enshittification or layer on more cruft, usually far after the fact multiple years and court fights later.