spending millions upon millons on lawyers will still be cheaper than paying their "employees" a living wage.

It's so culturally ingrained in the US. I used to look at the delivery driver subreddits sometimes. So many complaints from the US posters about individual customers not tipping, but almost no complaints about companies not paying people properly. Compare with other countries subreddits where those services operate, and the criticism is almost entirely of the company policies.

Red Scare propaganda was and continues to be hugely effective in the US.

I mean even though they generate a shit ton in revenue none of those companies are profitable. They will do everything they can to not increase driver costs.

Well, you see, the CEO really wants another mega-yacht. So obviously, decreasing profits by actually paying their workers a reasonable wage is bad, it'll delay the purchase of the yacht by days. Multiple days even!

There is no reason that isn't some hideous abomination of distorted logic.

From the article, a few drivers were concerned that mandating benefits and hourly wages would require the companies to implement work scheduling and eliminate the driver's time and commitment flexibility. This is the consequence DoorDash is also implicitly threatening.

Which, is... a valid concern from the perspective that companies will always do what is in their best interest rather than employee interests. But wages and benefits have no actual dependency on scheduling even if it's a common implementation. So they're basically just scared of any change which might affect their current precarious income, understandably. And DoorDash are obviously financially short-sightedly invested in drivers staying scared and exploitable.

From reading only the article and none of its cited sources: the change requires a $.50/minute increase while the driver is in the middle of a gig, or $17.96 (which is the rounded $18 in the headline). Assuming the driver is literally doing a job every minute (i.e. no gaps in-between deliveries), then that’s a $30 for an entire hour. So the cost-effective alternative is to have the employee on an hourly wage and just pay them $18/hr for x hours that they’re scheduled for. The quotes in the article explained how the switching from a per-job model to a “do as many jobs in the hours we schedule you for” means they’ll lose the benefit of flexible work schedules.

That said, I think the economy will speak for itself. Given the number of times I see companies complain in the media about “nobody wants to work”, they’ll need to pony up the money in order to maintain their share in the market.

I guess some are worried that whatever extra is given to them officially may be clawed back from them in some other way, unofficially.

Profits over people. Always.

This is really just Gig economy companies exploiting a "you're just a contractor and not an actual employee despite the fact that we rely upon you to exist, and you have no legal representation" labor loophole. They want to get back to ye olden days of the 1920s before we had federal labor laws that stopped companies from pulling this crap.