DoorDash settles with NYC, Lyft pays $272million and wait times are going up. LegalRideshare breaks it down.
DOORDASH TO PAY $132 MILLION
DoorDash is paying $132 Million over missing wages. Bloomberg reported:
The settlement, announced Tuesday, includes more than $83 million to resolve a disagreement over how to calculate pay for time that the workers spend online between deliveries, a requirement under the city’s rules. $12.3 million will go toward couriers who were underpaid or paid late due to invalid bank information on their accounts. DoorDash is also paying $16.7 million in fines to the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, which enforces the pay rule.
About 264,000 workers will receive compensation, DoorDash said, including 209,000 for missing or late payments. The average missing payment owed is $7.70, and while 65% of the affected couriers were underpaid by $1 or less, DoorDash said it will pay all affected couriers a minimum of $10. The median settlement will be around $48.
The settlement follows other actions by Mamdani on behalf of gig workers. His administration has said it’s recovered around $104 million in additional tips for app-based delivery workers since January. In August, Mamdani backed legislation targeting Amazon.com Inc.’s subcontracted delivery model, seeking to make large companies more directly responsible for drivers and conditions at last-mile facilities.
LYFT TO PAY CA $272 MILLION
Lyft is paying CA over $272 Million. Reuters reported:
Lyft has agreed to pay $272.5 million to settle claims by the state of California and three of its largest cities that the company mislabeled drivers as independent contractors rather than its employees to save money.
California sued Lyft in 2021, as did Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego
The cases were merged with lawsuits brought on behalf of thousands of Lyft drivers
The settlement, subject to court approval, covers alleged violations between April 2016 and December 2020
Lyft in a statement said drivers have always been properly classified under the law and “we’re glad to put this case behind us”
It is the largest settlement involving wage theft claims in California history, according to the state Labor Commissioner’s Office
Lyft and Uber in 2023 jointly agreed to pay $328 million to settle similar claims by New York’s attorney general
UBER WAIT TIMES ROSE 19%
Yes, you’re waiting longer for your Uber. Business Insider reported:
The time between when Uber matched a driver with a rider and when the car arrived grew 19% between the first quarter of 2023 and the same period this year, according to a new analysis by Len Sherman, an executive in residence and adjunct professor at Columbia Business School.
Over the same period, the price per mile that Uber charged rose 53% on average, per the analysis.
Sherman examined 37,500 trips completed by drivers in six US cities, compiled using data from GigU, an app that shows drivers how much they will make per minute and per mile on a trip before they accept it. Wait times increased in five of the six cities, including Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston.
Sherman’s study also pointed to the 2026 Axios Harris Poll 100, which ranks major companies based on their reputation. This year’s edition placed Uber 72nd on the list, lower than its position as 58th in 2025, with declines on metrics including trust, character, and ethics.
“This is a company that has acted in a way that clearly has lost the trust of their customers, riders, and drivers,” Sherman said.
LegalRideshare is the first law firm in the United States to focus exclusively on Uber®, Lyft®, robotaxis, Waymo, and gig worker accidents and injuries. Consultations are always free.
Full Video Transcript
Jared Hoffa: [00:34]
Ladies and gentlemen, drivers, gig workers, and everyone in between, welcome to the This Week in Rideshare podcast. I'm your host, Jared Hoffa. It is Friday, October 2nd, and this week: DoorDash settles with New York City, Lyft pays over $270 million, and wait times are going up. LegalRideshare breaks it down.
And from LegalRideshare, I'm joined by co-founder and lead attorney Bryant Greening. Bryant, happy Friday!
Bryant Greening: [01:03]
Happy Friday, Jared! Great to be back for yet another episode. We're going to edit those together one of these days and just have hundreds of times of us saying the same thing. I feel like people would like it, you know, to make some sort of GIF or meme out of it, I don't know.
Jared Hoffa: [01:24]
I think they would! I think we should do it. If anyone wants us to do it, comment in the chat, reply somewhere, let us know. I think it'd be funny.
And we're back to the basics this week. We've been doing a lot of different things—we've had Torsten on, last week was really focused on that one lawsuit, that one big case. We've done all kinds of different things; we're kind of going back to our basics today, but with some good stories, too.
Bryant Greening: [01:48]
Yeah, it feels good. Get back to the basics, get back to what we—our bread and butter.
Jared Hoffa: [01:53]
Bread and butter, and here we go. Speaking of bread and butter, there's a lot of bread that's being spent here, and a lot of today is about lawsuits and discrepancies.
The first one is DoorDash paying over $132 million over missing wages. This is from Bloomberg, and they reported, quote:
"The settlement announced Tuesday includes more than $83 million to resolve a disagreement over how to calculate pay for time that workers spend online between deliveries—a requirement under the city's rules. $12.3 million will go towards couriers who were underpaid or paid late due to invalid bank information on their accounts. About 264,000 workers are going to receive compensation, DoorDash said, including 209,000 for missing or late payments."
Bryant, this is interesting because these stories started trickling out, I would really say, during COVID because of the heightened use of delivery apps. But a substantial amount of money, and clearly they messed up big time.
Bryant Greening: [02:58]
Yeah, it's a huge amount of money, and it's a lot of money out of workers' pockets. I think what stands out is that this is just another reminder of how much power these platforms have over the sheer economics of gig work. They have an algorithm that's determining when someone is working, what their time is worth, and ultimately what shows up in their bank accounts.
So even relatively small decisions or discrepancies in compensation affects hundreds of thousands of people, it affects hundred-plus million dollars. It's just a huge amount of turmoil that's created for the working class.
There's also a mention in here about the dispute over waiting time—when a driver is logged in and available and ready to work, but there isn't an order coming through, and who should bear the burden of that downtime. There's so many examples of the way that gig companies make decisions that affect workers' bottom lines: whether it's withholding money that should have been paid, not calculating it properly, not paying people when they're on the clock, taking time away from their day.
The economics of gig work—we've been doing this for over a decade now, but it's still not really clear. There's a lot of murkiness, and the companies still have so much power. I'm glad to see that there's cities and local governments that are trying to find ways to hold the gig companies responsible and hold their feet to the fire to make sure that the labor market—the workers—are taken care of, and just bluntly, that they don't get screwed over.
Jared Hoffa: [04:52]
Yeah, and you bring up a good point too about the wait times. That is a portion of the story, and they always fall back into, "Well, they're independent contractors." But we discussed this, and I do think some cities and states are getting more aggressive and being really clear on: look, yes, they are independent contractors, but we need a new classification.
A good example is exactly that: the wait times. If you argue that they're just like independent contractors that have existed forever, it doesn't make sense. If you're an independent contractor and you're a mechanic, an engineer, anything doing construction—when you are active and basically on the job or ready to do the job, it doesn't matter if you haven't physically started fixing the roof yet. You are on the job, you're actively there, versus "I'm not doing work today because I don't have to." Okay, that's the equivalent of the app being turned off.
And so, like you said, the sort of in-between that they say, "Well, they're not really working"—well, they are working. That's the whole point: they are at the work site, they are working, they just haven't actively done anything yet.
More in the story too, it's really saying Mamdani and his team are really cracking down on a lot of this. They said in August, Mamdani backed legislation targeting Amazon.com's subcontracted delivery model, seeking to make large companies more responsible for drivers and conditions at last-mile facilities. So it's really the same thing where they've been skirting around this for a long time, and I think the law is finally catching up to them and saying, "You got to pay, and this has to change." And I think it should.
Bryant Greening: [06:36]
It should, and I'm glad that we're seeing cities and states stepping in.
Jared Hoffa: [06:42]
Yeah, and moving on to our second story, which is yet another payout—and this time it's from Lyft. Lyft is paying California over $270 million. This is from Reuters, and they reported, quote:
"Lyft has agreed to pay $272 million to settle claims by the state of California and three of its largest cities that the company mislabeled drivers as independent contractors rather than its employees to save money. California sued Lyft in 2021, as did LA, San Francisco, and San Diego. The cases were merged with lawsuits brought on behalf of thousands of Lyft drivers. The settlement, which is subject to court approval, covers alleged violations between April 2016 and December of 2020. It is the largest settlement involving wage theft claims in California history, according to the state labor commissioner's office."
So another big win for drivers regarding wage theft, and again, I think finally there's some repercussions for this.
Bryant Greening: [07:47]
Yeah, there's repercussions, but there's not ultimately change, is the big thing. We're seeing that gig companies are being forced to pay when they're misclassifying people, but they're not forced to reclassify in most situations.
Ultimately, this is a fight that's been going on since the beginning of gig work. Ever since Uber and Lyft came onto the scene a decade-plus ago, everybody's been asking: what exactly is a rideshare driver? Are they an employee, or are they an independent contractor?
The companies have been basing their business model around the idea that drivers are independent contractors because it saves them a ton of money. They don't have to pay for things like workers' compensation insurance, paid time off, health insurance—things of that nature don't come due to the company when drivers are independent contractors. You can see how much money they're saving by how much money they're willing to pay in these settlements in order to maintain the status of independent contractor for their drivers. Lyft just agreed to pay out almost $300 million, and that's just in one state. So it's an extremely important classification for the companies.
Some would say drivers gain some benefit in terms of flexibility with the classification, but really the drivers are the ones that are harmed by the lack of protection that the independent contractor status provides.
I don't think this debate is going anywhere. It's been something we've been talking about for a decade. The companies keep changing their model or tweaking their model to fit around different laws that have gone into effect. Ultimately, like we've been saying for as long as this podcast has been going on, I think the federal government needs to step in and create a new type of classification somewhere in between employee and independent contractor that can both serve the economics of these models—these companies are very important to our economy—but also protects the worker to ensure they're paid a living wage, have basic protections, that if they get deactivated there's a way to appeal that and there's due process. There's just all sorts of different ways that we can try to make this model better that the current structure does not allow for.
Jared Hoffa: [10:11]
Yeah, I absolutely agree. And this is a second story just this week about an issue with wrong classification. Like you said, we're talking about this kind of settlement in California, but in 2023, Uber and Lyft together paid over $300 million to settle similar claims. So this has been going on forever.
I do think the federal government has to step in for a multitude of reasons to fix this, to help stabilize things so it's not constant lawsuits. And then also, as you see, this is a settlement that was between 2016 and 2020; it took six years from that moment to finally settle these claims. So, okay, great, it's a win, but it's been six years now instead of it just working the way it's supposed to work and then everyone's happy and we move on.
Again, like you said, they must really look at their options and say, "Look, it's easier for us to pay a couple hundred million than to make this work the way it's supposed to work."
Bryant Greening: [11:13]
And that's the craziest story, right? They want to hold on to this status; that's the bottom line. They will pay whatever they have to to hold on to the status because it's extremely valuable to them.
Jared Hoffa: [11:22]
Yep. And our final story, which is interesting—and I actually feel this: you are actually waiting longer for your Uber. This is from Business Insider, and they reported, quote:
"The time between when Uber matched a driver with a rider and when the car arrived grew 19% between the first quarter of 2023 and the same period this year, according to a new analysis by Len Sherman, an executive in residence and adjunct professor at Columbia Business School."
Even better—and by better, I mean very sarcastically—over the same period, the price per mile that Uber charged rose 53% on average!
How do we get this data? Well, Sherman examined over 33,000 trips completed by drivers in six US cities, which was compiled by data from Gigpro—our buddies over there—an app that shows drivers how much they make per minute and per mile on a trip before they accept it. Wait times increased in five of the six cities, including Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston.
This goes into even more information; it's a really good read, pretty fast read. But basically, the argument also is: Sherman points out this is the only way they can make money—to make it slower, make it harder, and make the rides more expensive, and he's calling them out on it.
Bryant Greening: [12:50]
Yeah, and they need to be called out on it. This goes directly to the original promise of rideshare—the reason why rideshare took off initially—because it was supposed to be cheaper, faster, and more convenient than the traditional taxi system.
Once we see that wait times are going up and prices are going up, you have to ask yourself: is rideshare better than it used to be with the original taxi? I don't want to get ahead of myself and say the original taxi system was horrible, but was so much of this propped up by private equity? Were these wait times and prices inflated? Was that real, or was that just because they were operating on a loss?
Now that these companies have to make a profit, we're starting to see that transportation costs a lot and logistically is very hard. We have to ask ourselves whether passengers are going to stand for that. At what point does it become too costly to take a ride? At what point does it take too long to wait for that ride to show up, and you might just decide to walk, take public transportation, or hail that taxi?
It's seeming like rideshare is starting to lose some of the advantages that it originally promised and showed in comparison to the system that it replaced.
Jared Hoffa: [14:19]
Yeah, and I agree. It's still better than how taxis used to be, obviously, but like you said, how much of that is, "Oh my god, it's so much cheaper and so much faster"? Turns out it's not.
What would be great is if they could actually indicate how much rides were and time was before rideshare. I'd love to know that data and see: is it any cheaper today? I'm sure it's not, just due to inflation. But when you see a 19% wait time increase and a 53% cost increase on average, it's insane.
Top that off with: he also pointed to a 2026 study called the Axios Harris Poll 100, which ranks major companies based on their reputation. This year's edition placed Uber 72nd on the list out of 100, and last year it was 58th, which wasn't great, but you see how much it dropped in just a year with declines on metrics including trust, character, and ethics.
So you're really batting zero here when times are getting worse, costs are going up, and no one—including riders or drivers—even likes your company. I'm sure Waymo is cheering this on because they're seeing: "Okay, Uber has the market, but no one's happy with it and they want change."
Bryant Greening: [15:48]
Yeah, they're vulnerable. That's the thing: I think autonomous vehicles, Waymo, robotaxis—they're coming, and they're seeing that there's open space here to enter the rideshare market. Cost is extremely important today with the way that the economy is going and inflation; people are cost-sensitive. If they see that an Uber ride is 53% more expensive than it was not that long ago, they're going to think twice about ordering it.
The same thing goes with time. Time was the big win when rideshare came in. Jared, you and I are like the last generation to really remember how bad the taxi industry was.
Jared Hoffa: [16:36]
Yeah, we saw the transition.
Bryant Greening: [16:43]
There was a period of time in our lives where you couldn't get a ride really anywhere if you weren't living in a main metropolitan city, or you'd have to call ahead and you'd wait an hour for that taxi to show up, and sometimes they wouldn't show up.
That was the benefit rideshare gave: you knew that ride was coming, you could watch it on your phone, you could see that it was getting closer to you, and it was always there within a matter of minutes. The fact that it was super cheap was an added benefit, but it was the reliability that was really the game-changing technology.
Now, if it's becoming less reliable and more expensive, that has me worried about what the current structure of rideshare is, and it has to be an opportunity for companies like Waymo to step in and say, "Oh, we can improve this, and we can do it cheaper and quicker." If they can do that, they're going to have much more success coming into the market.
Jared Hoffa: [17:44]
Yeah, we've talked about this before with Uber being afraid of "being Ubered." When we see stories like this with actual data, it points to a very real possibility. The market is open for competitors who can figure that out.
That is the stories for this week! And of course, Bryant, I will give you the final say before we head into the weekend.
Bryant Greening: [18:05]
Always remind everybody that if you find yourself in a rideshare, gig, or autonomous vehicle crash, we can help. We can make sure that you get paid for things like medical bills, lost wages, pain and suffering, and any sort of damage that you sustain. LegalRideshare is the first law firm in the United States to focus on these issues, and our consultations are always free, so please don't hesitate to reach out. LegalRideshare.com has all of our contact information. Time is of the essence, so if you're injured in a rideshare, gig, or Waymo crash, please contact LegalRideshare right away.
Jared Hoffa: [18:53]
Great. Thank you, Bryant. And as I like to say, that is the end of This Week in Rideshare. See you next week!