Doordash has reached a historic $131.5 million settlement to repay workers in New York City for wages the food delivery app stole from them over the last four years, which sounds like a big win for the little guy if you don’t think about it too hard.
The Hill reports:
“Under the settlement with the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP), which New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) and city officials announced on Tuesday, DoorDash will pay $115 million to 260,000-plus workers it either did not pay at all or paid late. The food delivery company will also pay more than $16 million in civil penalties and costs.”
So all Doordash has to do is return the money it stole and pay a microscopic fraction of its $13.7 billion yearly revenue in penalties, and that’s it. Nobody’s going to prison. Nobody was threatened with jail time. It wasn’t even a criminal case; it was an administrative enforcement action by New York City regulators. Doordash’s billionaire CEO Tony Xu is as free as a bird.
A hundred and fifteen million dollars.
What do you think would happen to you if you stole $115 million from your employer?
Can you imagine that not being treated as a crime? Can you imagine going “Haha, ya got me! I’ll return the cash. Can’t blame a guy for trying!” and then paying a small fine and just going back to your life like it was no big deal?
Of course you can’t. You know you’d be arrested, handcuffed, prosecuted for grand larceny, and then spend many years behind bars.
Under capitalism it is strictly illegal for employees to steal from their employers, but if employers steal from their employees it’s not even a crime. It’s not even a petty misdemeanor. It’s perfectly legal.
Which is so obnoxious, because stealing from workers is obviously much more abusive and destructive than stealing from billionaire corporations. The wealthy executives of a gig economy app would not have their lives affected in the slightest by an employee stealing from their company, but workers who are struggling to pay their bills can be devastated by even a few missing dollars in their paycheck.
Employers stealing from employees is also plainly worse than the reverse because when an employer steals from an employee, they’re not just stealing their money. They’re stealing their labor. They’re stealing their time, which is the one thing you can’t make more of in this life. They’re stealing slices of your lifespan which you would otherwise be spending with loved ones and doing things that fulfill you. They’re actually stealing your life.
And yet it’s only illegal for employees to steal from their employers. Employers stealing from employees? That’s just business.
This glaring disparity between the rights of employers and employees exists because capitalism is all about using state power to protect the interests of capital. The most ardent proponents of our present system like to contrast capitalism with communism by claiming that communism can only be enforced through abusive excesses of state power, as though we don’t see state power dropping the hammer on the working class every minute of every day throughout our society. In practice the most significant difference between a socialist state and a capitalist one is whose interests state power is used to protect.
We live in a tiered society where the people actually turning the wheels of civilization through their sweat and toil are legally inferior to the parasitic middle men who skim the profits from their labor. This is not justice, and this is not equality, as hard as the propagandists of the capitalist empire might try to indoctrinate us into believing the contrary.
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