A new earning model DoorDash introduced yesterday (June 28) will pay gig workers an hourly wage, but there’s a catch: The minutes adding up to a hour must be spent actively on the job. Waiting for orders, apparently, isn’t part of it.

The California-based company, which so far paid workers per order like much of the rest of its industry, added another pay option—Earn by Time—that assures delivery personnel of “a guaranteed hourly minimum rate for time spent on a delivery.” But just being online on the app and available to make deliveries won’t cut it. DoorDash defines “time spent on a delivery” as the period between accepting an offer and dropping it off...

DoorDash only counts time spent on-duty, the hourly pay structure could get workers to accept smaller deliveries they would have skipped to “push as many orders as they can,” Sergio Avedian, a longtime driver and a contributor to The Rideshare Guy, a blog that doles out tips to gig drivers, told the New York Times. But that’s not all. Drivers on Earn by Time cannot reject order offers. Declining or unassigning more than one order per hour will lead to the Earn by Time dash automatically ending.

Moreover, some benefits like priority access to high-paying priority, where Dashers with a customer rating of at least 4.5 and an acceptance rate of at least 50%, aren’t available in the Earn By Time mode...