DoorDash has agreed to a $131 million settlement with New York City over underpaying or waiting too long to pay delivery workers, ending a legal battle between City Hall and the food delivery company.
The multi-million-dollar settlement with the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection will see the popular app fork over $83 million to resolve a dispute over how to calculate pay for couriers who were logged into the app and waiting for work but were not actually making deliveries, Doordash said.
It also includes $12.3 million for workers who were underpaid or paid late, the company said.
DoorDash just coughed up a whopping $131 million to NYC, settling a settlement with the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. Christopher Sadowski for NY Post
“Simply put, we screwed up,” DoorDash officials said in a statement. “Our mistakes meant some Dashers were underpaid or paid late.
“While these mistakes weren’t intentional, that doesn’t make them okay,” the statement added.
“We pride ourselves on operational excellence at DoorDash — and this was not excellent, nor was it acceptable. Dashers should be paid in full, on time, every time. We are sorry to the Dashers we let down.”
DoorDash — the largest food delivery platform in the US — said that many of the errors resulted from deliveries that crossed city boundaries, had multiple pickup or drop-off locations, or were only partially fulfilled or canceled.
It said other errors were caused by technical bugs or by couriers providing incomplete or inaccurate banking information
Less than 1% of all payments to Big Apple delivery workers were affected and the median payout to couriers would be around $48, the company added.
DoorDash admitted they “screwed up,” saying mistakes led to underpaid or late payments for less than 1% of their 264,000 “Dashers.” REUTERS
The settlement comes after a separate report earlier this year by the city Department of Consumer and Worker Protection accused DoorDash and Uber Eats of ripping off delivery workers out of more than $550 million because of the companies’ tipping system.
The tipping policy required customers to leave gratuities after checkout, which, according to the report released in January, resulted in the average tip for DoorDash and Uber Eats delivery workers plunging from $3.66 per order to just 76 cents.
Big Apple laws require the food delivery apps to offer customers a chance to leave tips for drivers at checkout, with a default option of 10% of the cost of the order.