KEEP UP ON DENVER NEWS AT WESTWORD.COM/NEWS NEWS Union Dash COLORADO’S GIG-ECONOMY DRIVERS JOIN FORCES TO ADVOCATE FOR BETTER WORKING CONDITIONS. BY CATIE CHESHIRE Sandra Parker-Murray has been a union member for 25 years through the Communi- cations Workers of America. Until September, she worked at Avaya, a business communica- tions company, as a service coordinator. The job brought her to Denver from Atlanta in 2008, and it would have taken her to Okla- homa this year if she’d followed the company. Instead, she stayed in Denver and works as a DoorDash driver, switching her CWA mem- bership to Colorado Independent Drivers United, an emerging union for ride share, delivery, pedicab, taxi and limousine drivers. DoorDash runs can’t replace all of her income, but they’ll keep her going while she decides what she wants to do next. She’s also working for CIDU and will be lobbying for various workers’-rights issues in the next legislative session. Parker-Murray says that she’s glad she can still be a union member through this transition. Early in her career, she was ha- rassed and intimidated by a manager, she ex- plains, and the CWA helped protect her. She went on to become a union representative. Helping get CIDU off the ground is her next union-related project. “I love driving and not having to report to anybody, but I just wish they would respect and value you more,” she says. Food-delivery drivers like Parker-Murray are responsible for their own car mainte- nance, gas and schedule. While that gives them some fl exibility, they are not treated like true independent contractors; instead, they’re dependent on the app and policies of the delivery service. Parker-Murray says that she’s had issues with nearly every aspect of the DoorDash process, from an often-faulty navigation system to a lack of accounting for time spent in drive-thrus. And then there’s the fact that it can send her all the way across town from south Aurora, where she lives, to Denver In- ternational Airport and back, and she won’t know the destination until she accepts the order. While mileage is part of the base rate that DoorDash offers drivers for each order, Parker-Murray says that the correlation isn’t strong enough to make long trips worth it. Most times, she notes, DoorDash pays about $3 for a trip, and the rest of her pay is determined by customer tips. CIDU members rallied in front of the 6 Colorado Capitol and the Public Utilities Commission offi ce in early October. They want the state to implement policies that would limit Uber, Lyft and other gig-driver companies to no more than 25 percent of the profi ts from each ride or delivery, and to require them to add a $2-per-ride gas surcharge that would go to the driver. Among other things, the PUC oversees the 2014 Transportation Network Com- panies Act, which requires app companies to be transparent with drivers about how fares are calculated and what they will get paid for each job. But sometimes drivers are deactivated without being given a reason, they say. According to union members, the companies are not fully transparent about the causes, and the PUC hasn’t taken action. According to Gail Conners, section chief of media relations, outreach and engagement for the PUC, the commission has heard 212 cases involving the company that owns Uber since the act passed, but those are only the investigation numbers. “When calls come in, they fi rst go through Consumer Affairs, and many cases are handled there,” Con- ners notes. “Many are mitigated before an investigation is enacted.” Since 2020, when the pandemic hit, there have only been seven Uber investigations and one for Lyft. Meanwhile, deliveries have gone up, as have complaints from drivers. CIDU would like to see the PUC strengthen its oversight and accelerate its actions. A key concern for the union is that drivers don’t have the freedom to select their gigs the way that independent contractors are supposed to. Parker-Murray has worked her way up on the DoorDash tier — her term for the DoorDash system that rates drivers, promoting or demoting them — since she started delivering in 2020, but she says it’s not clear how the tier ratings are determined. Early on, she was confi ned to her home de- livery area in Aurora, where she typically starts her dashes. Now she can go more places, but if she turns down too many orders, she could get bumped back down a tier. She’d like to reject shopping orders that require fi nding specifi c items in a grocery store, because those jobs are time-consuming and don’t pay more than typical delivery orders, but she sometimes has to accept them to keep her internal rating high. “They don’t tell you how much it drops or how that works,” Parker-Murray says, so she’s always guessing. Stephanie Vigil, a food-delivery driver who organizes for CIDU and is running for House District 16, cites so-called “unicorn orders” as an example of DoorDash’s lack of transparency. Sometimes the app will give an order that offers potential earnings of the dol- lar amount “plus,” she notes; at the end of the ride, the driver fi nds out how much they made, and it’s always more than initially promised. “Nice, huh?” Vigil says. “But what they’re actually doing is they’re turning this — which should be a matter of informed decision- Sandra Parker-Murray drives for DoorDash. making — into a slot machine. What you end up doing then, if you are one of those people who gets one of those unicorn payments every so often, is that you’ll take a ton of those $6 orders, $4 orders, $3 orders, hoping that you’ll get a big payout once in a while.” On October 19, Parker-Murray got one such order, promising her $7.50-plus for picking up and delivering from Urban Som- brero. At that point, she’d been working for nearly an hour and a half without declining an order; she ended up making $12.50 on the trip, almost $4 more than she made on any other delivery that day, because the customer tipped $9 and DoorDash contributed $3.50. When she completed the order, a notifi ca- tion from DoorDash popped up, explaining that her high acceptance rate and customer rating gave her priority for the order. Vigil suggests that drivers should be bet- ter informed about how their actions change their tier rating and how much they’ll make each trip. Striving to qualify for priority on those “unicorn orders” traps drivers into taking jobs they wouldn’t otherwise accept. “Dashers deserve to have their voices heard, which is why we’ve always created channels to seek their feedback,” DoorDash says in a statement to Westword. “Time and again, Dashers have told us that they value the fl exibility and high earning potential DoorDash offers. We’ll continue to engage with our community while supporting poli- cies and products that best serve Dashers, merchants, and customers.” More people will have jobs like these as time goes on, Vigil predicts, so unionizing and advocating for those workers is impor- tant. She’s been a gig worker for years as a baker, a nanny and a driver, and says that if she’s elected, she hopes to bring a voice to people who make up a large part of Colo- rado’s economy. “There should be some basics,” Vigil says. “I have a say in the system. My time is valuable. I run my own work. Those are fair principles to work with. ... Drivers should have a say in the system. It can’t just be run from the top down.” Unlike members of many unions, those in CIDU don’t have a shared workplace or employer. They probably won’t have a collective-bargaining agreement, either. Rather, CIDU is a way for drivers to come together to advocate for better working conditions across the industry, Vigil says. Though she defi nitely wants better work- ing conditions for delivery drivers, Parker- Murray says she’s learned some valuable information on the job, including which places tend to have clean bathrooms (Wing- stop and Panda Express) and which to avoid (any grocery store). She’s also determined that ordering a drink through DoorDash is risky. Drivers often have to fi ll up the drinks themselves, pressing on the lids without washing their hands or wearing gloves the way restaurant employees might. “What if my hands were nasty?” she asks. When Parker-Murray runs into other de- livery drivers, she tries to get them involved in the union — but many of them are hesitant to advocate for better working conditions because they don’t want to lose the benefi ts of being a gig worker. “They’ll take the unfair treat- ment because they like the fl exibility, but that’s what [the companies] use to keep people from complaining,” Parker-Murray says. “It makes people think that they’re doing them a favor.” Joining a union will be worth it, she tells them. “It protects your job,” she says. “Because people might not like you. You could be too light or too dark, too thick, too thin. They just have their reasons, because they’re humans, and humans can be awful people sometimes.” But humans can also be good people, she adds, which is why she likes the job. She’d just like it to operate under good rules, too. Email the author at [email protected]. NOVEMBER 3-9, 2022 WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | westword.com CATIE CHESHIRE
