Wage theft is wage theft, and DoorDash just got caught stiffing more than 260,000 delivery workers while pulling in nearly a billion dollars in profit. A $131.5 million settlement, with over $115 million going straight back to couriers, proves enforcement works when a city actually stands with working people. Let every app company take note: opaque algorithms don't get the final word on what a worker earns.
Strip away the podium speeches and this was a bookkeeping problem, not a scheme. Less than 1% of payments were affected, 65% of impacted workers were short by a dollar or less, and the bulk of the money settles a technical dispute over how to calculate on-call time under the most complex delivery pay rules in the country. Fixing the bugs and paying workers quickly beats years of litigation.
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