Comment by taurath
2 hours ago
Its not a labor shortage, its a shortage of people for whom doing the job can pay the bills they need paid.
The answer is not to find new pools of desperate people but to improve working conditions (pay, benefits) and on a macro level reducing cost of living so the people performing the work don't have to work so much they stop being able to.
The way you COULD do that is to reduce administrative cost. From their most recent filing, marketing costs them 1/4 of their revenue, R&D (software development) 1/5th, and operations and administration 1/8th each. Their cost of revenue aka what they pay to their "shoppers" aka lower-class labor and the businesses they integrate with is 1/4th of gross, barely a pittance compared to the slush funds for management and investor payouts.
Take a look yourself: https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001579091/a4bcc10...
Bottom line: they are making money hand over fist, with the vast vast majority not going to workers but the corporate employees and investors. Your issue with delivery drivers is an issue with the bottom-of-the-barrel treatment decided by management - they could solve this problem (EASILY), but they choose not to in order to pay for more corporate employees and to have more profit to shareholders. The numbers are clear as day.
> Its not a labor shortage, its a shortage of people for whom doing the job can pay the bills they need paid.
I think this fact is often missed by middle/upper-middle-class tech folks (like a majority of this forum). From up here, it's eas to view labor as being an equitable exchange between two parties, but as you said, that is simply not the case when the pay doesn't even come close to covering expenses.
The refrain I often hear is that those people should then just work harder and get a better job - but then the question is, who delivers the food? To which I have yet to hear a satisfying answer (besides incentivizing better wages for those workers)