May National #PayUp Meeting!
Miss the National #PayUp Meeting this month? Attended, but just want a refresher?
Check out the video above — or dig into the notes. But before you do, three things you can do right now to keep the campaign moving forward:
Sign up to organize a local meeting in your area.
Sign on & share our petition to stop Postmates pay cuts.
RSVP for the next National Pay Up Meeting.
What happened at the meeting…
Policy development
Alexis, the policy expert who’s working on shaping our three #PayUp demands (pay floor of $15/hr + expenses, tips on top, and transparency) into detailed policy, shared some info about that process.
Alexis & her team dug into more than 500 policy survey submissions from gig workers and found broad consensus around the three #PayUp goals. The survey also gave them useful input about how the $15/hr + expenses pay floor should work — the vast majority of gig workers agreed all time, and all miles, from when you accept a job to when you drop it off, should be covered.
Policy development is moving forward & Alexis and her team will be working with a dedicated policy workgroup of gig workers (if you’re interested in joining, email gig@workingwa.org) as well as meeting with stakeholders and lawmakers. In the coming weeks, we’ll have a fleshed out policy — and then it will be important to start connecting with local lawmakers to introduce our ideas.
Theresa’s local meeting in Houston!
Local meetings
An important part of making change at the local level: building a base in your community. Theresa, a gig worker from Houston, shared her experience stepping up to organize a local meeting.
Theresa’s planning to organize another meeting in June — and you can too! As she said at the meeting: “Get involved, because you need to have that experience of banding together and knowing that your concerns, whether they’re small or large — it matters.”
Click here to sign up to organize or attend a local meeting. (You’ll get a training and an agenda and other tools to make your meeting a success!)
And click here for flyers you can use to do outreach, whether you’re organizing a local meeting or not!
Postmates
We also addressed the overnight pay cut on Postmates — and Daniel, a Postmates worker in Glendora, CA, shared his experience. Without warning, pay was cut up to 30% overnight — so now, we’re bringing Postmates workers together to fight for change.
The big goals of the #PayUp campaign are new laws. But along the way, we can be responsive when issues like this come up and work to hold companies publicly accountable. If you want to be a part of the fight to end pay cuts on Postmates, sign on here.
Gig app rating system
They rate us — now it’s time for us to rate them.
In the next couple weeks, we’ll be launching a gig app rating system. The idea is this: gig apps need a constant influx of new workers to keep paying so low. If we release real, transparent info about work and pay are like on these apps, workers get more power. We can make more informed decisions about which apps are worth our time, and spread the word about the ones that aren’t.
If we want the rating system to work, we’ll need ratings from at least 1,000 gig workers on different apps — so keep an eye out for the system when we release it & do your part by sharing it with other gig workers!
Planning a weekend of action for gig workers’ rights!
Together, gig workers with the #PayUp campaign are planning a multi-app, national weekend of action for gig workers’ rights that will bring attention to our cause. We’re in very early planning stages, but talked through some ideas at the meeting and will be keeping everyone involved as we plan.
What are the goals of a national weekend of action for gig workers’ rights? Speaking out publicly will make more customers and supporters aware of what’s going on. It will get some attention for our campaign and cause to build support for passing new laws. It will bring workers on different apps together around a shared goal. And, we’ll be directly calling on companies to change the way they’re paying.
So far, our plan involves three major pieces:
1) Collective action: Setting our own pay floor
We don’t have to wait for laws to pass to set our own pay floor. For the weekend, workers will refuse jobs that pay too low and demand more from their companies. That’s a powerful thing to do as an individual asserting your rights as an independent contractor — and it’s even more powerful if we can get hundreds or thousands of workers across the country on board. We’ll also plan in-person demonstrations to show the world what it looks like when workers stand together and demand better. We’ll need to do outreach to lots and lots of workers to make our collective action work — stay tuned.
2) Calling on partner companies to support workers
Gig companies like Instacart and DoorDash partner with some major stores and restaurants that probably don’t want to be associated with underpaying and mistreating workers. Let’s call on these partner companies to speak up about workers’ rights.
3) Getting customers involved
We need customers on board for our plan to work too — at the meeting, we discussed having customers post on social media, flood companies with calls directly, and a few other ideas.
We need time to coordinate and make this action a success. We’re planning it for the weekend after Labor Day — Sept. 6-9. Stay tuned as we make more plans, and if you want to be part of it all, make sure to RSVP for the next National Pay Up Meeting in July!