
- CHIPOTLE DELIVERY STATUS LOOKING FOR A DRIVER DRIVERS
- CHIPOTLE DELIVERY STATUS LOOKING FOR A DRIVER PROFESSIONAL
As the cost of an Uber ride increases, consumers might pay a little more, but the real losers are the people behind the wheel, who probably won’t see any more of that bigger fare.įrom Chipotle to Uber, these are obvious examples of class war, of senior company leaders and influential shareholders continuing a decades-long tradition of underpaying frontline workers in order to reap the benefits for themselves.
CHIPOTLE DELIVERY STATUS LOOKING FOR A DRIVER DRIVERS
These corporate gains have been solidified by measures like California’s Proposition 22, which ensured that Uber doesn’t have to treat its drivers as employees, and the model is now being road-tested in legislatures and municipal elections nationwide.

CHIPOTLE DELIVERY STATUS LOOKING FOR A DRIVER PROFESSIONAL
In some cases flagrantly defying the law, companies like Uber have largely done what they want, fattening themselves on cheap investment capital and leveraging workers’ desperation for any kind of paying gig in an attenuated economy that only works for the professional and upper classes. Gig labor platforms gouge workers, keeping them precarious and underpaid, without benefits or protections of employee status-all facts that have been apparent and well studied for years. And once again, the attendant costs are being “passed on” to consumers.īut it’s not until the final paragraph of his piece that Roose addresses the labor exploitation baked into these models. “Now, users are noticing that for the first time-whether because of disappearing subsidies or merely an end-of-pandemic demand surge-their luxury habits actually carry luxury price tags.” Whereas tech-forward consumers were once able to summon a cheap black car on demand, now the pendulum has swung the other way. s “flooded these companies with cash, which often got passed on to users in the form of artificially low prices and generous incentives,” wrote Roose. Looking at what he called “the golden era of the Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy”-think cheap, venture capital–subsidized gig platforms delivery services and offerings like Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, MoviePass, WeWork, etc.-Roose noted that many of these companies are now raising prices, hoping finally to capitalize on scale in exchange for revenue-and perhaps even achieve profit. But a recent piece in The New York Times by Kevin Roose offered some insight. The question of why things cost what they do can seem like a hazy one, or perhaps a way to get lost in a thicket of economic and accounting jargon. (Chipotle also benefited from “lower avocado pricing,” it noted in a release.)Īs Congressman Ro Khanna said on Twitter, commenting on the company’s CEO pay, “Chipotle is not raising prices because of rising wages.” It’s doing so out of greed, to preserve, and even boost, the extraordinary compensation of its executives, directors, and primary shareholders. And a recent Securities and Exchange Commission filing shows that, in the first three months of 2021, its labor costs actually decreased by 10.2 percent. In recent years, the fast-casual burrito chain, like many large companies, has conducted hundreds of millions of dollars in share buybacks, which are used to juice a firm’s stock price, often to the benefit of executives exercising their own stock options. In 2020, Chipotle’s CEO was paid $38 million, but that’s only part of the picture. Chipotle is doing very well, making more than $350 million in profit last year, matching a similarly profitable 2019. It helps, then, to expand the aperture and take a look at how some of these companies are husbanding their vast resources. While consumer demand is returning, workers aren’t, so restaurants are raising wages, not because most workers haven’t had a raise against inflation in 40 years, but because it’s a way of getting workers back in the door, despite potentially hazardous Covid-19 and more familiar crappy job conditions. “From the cereal maker General Mills to Chipotle Mexican Grill to the paint maker Sherwin-Williams, a range of companies have been raising prices or plan to do so, in some cases to make up for higher wages that they’re now paying to keep or attract workers,” Marketplace reported on Thursday. Linking rising prices to workers’ demands for better wages is becoming a widely used trope.


And so, as a spate of headlines this week now remind us, a Chipotle burrito now costs 4 percent more than it did last week. Following the shareholder’s logic, modest increases in worker pay-their demand for a living wage-must be “passed on” to the consumer. If you listen to the sophistry emanating from corporate leaders and their stenographers in the business press, prices for goods and services are surging, and one of the causes is quite simple: Workers want more money.
