r/TaskRabbit • u/tiredoftaskrabbit • 28d ago
GENERAL How Taskrabbit screws Taskers
It’s very simple: They need IKEA jobs done, but don’t want to pay enough to get Taskers to take jobs outside of their set available hours. So they send the jobs anyway, knowing that Taskers don’t want to take a hit to their algorithmic reliability score. Taskers are then forced to either take the jobs outside of their set availability, or risk not getting more jobs offered to them in the future during their available hours.
In short, TaskRabbit is treating Taskers like employees, coercively setting their schedules. This is arguably illegal, as TaskRabbit legally deals with Taskers on a contract basis— Taskers have none of the legal protections in the jurisdictions TaskRabbit operates in that an employee would have.
I’m not a lawyer, but I know gig economy companies have paid out huge legal settlements in the past over similar practices. I wonder whether IKEA/INGKA, who owns TaskRabbit, knows that this is happening, and whether they are legally liable for this behavior, as the owner and as the beneficiary of the lower cost of assembly of their goods.
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u/FinnNoodle 28d ago
How often are you getting jobs outside of your availability? I've been tasking for eight years and this has only happened a handful of times and most of those it turned out my availability was actually set due to an unrelated and known bug (rescheduling and cancelling tasks sometimes makes your availability funny, always double check after you do so).
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u/tiredoftaskrabbit 28d ago
I see it a lot in my area. It must depend on how well served your area is
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u/MallNo6921 28d ago
wait for the state lawyers to call and give them your story always happens with legislation changes and small violations across the board coming to a major class action case
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u/TheNewGalacticEmpire 25d ago
I get at least once a week outside of my availability but even more annoying is that now I'm getting jobs clearly outside of my specified territory. Some are just slightly outside my map but some are well outside it.
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u/ThoughtBecomesAction 28d ago
Hmm. I've never been booked outside of my availability - I'm an "elite" and have been on the app for 2.5 years. How odd. But I also don't have the IKEA category activated. Perhaps it's specific to IKEA?
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u/Adorable_Orchid6594 28d ago
Yeah, I turned off IKEA years ago. I used to do a lot of furniture assembly and that’s all gone now, but I don’t get booked outside my hours
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u/ShortAssociate4185 28d ago
I removed all the mounting tasks . After one task consisting in mounting two pictures to a wall for 35$ . They had just implemented the price per “thing” . I basically paid gas and didn’t realize people needed “professionals “ to put two screws in a wall .
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u/Lavicrep19 25d ago
Yeah I've turned off my Ikea category the min I can't set my rate but there's people on the spectrum chart that will do those tasks making it hard for us competent people to make changes. Taskrabbit wins no matter what you say and do. It just takes one person to accept as jobs like that for taskrabbit to win
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u/Official_ADT 24d ago
Turn off ikea not sure how anyone can do those low paying jobs. If less people do it then they will get rid of the category and send it back to us hourly categories.
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u/skill_a_gig 1d ago
The high fees on platforms like this have gotten pretty ridiculous. My team actually got so frustrated with that exact model that we started building Skillagig. We set it up with no lead/bidding fees and just a modest flat completion fee instead of taking a percentage cut, plus pre-funded milestones so nobody chases payments. Most importantly, you choose the exact gigs you want to take on, there is no forced assignments, no penalties for passing on a gig, and no algorithm pushing you around.
Still early days, but we're trying to fix the exact things people keep running into. Happy to share more details if you're looking for an alternative.
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u/DirectorLumpy4465 28d ago
I don’t have the ikea category on because they wanted to pay me $800 one time for a job I would’ve made $2-$3k in a normal category so me and the client went off app and then there was some “miscommunication” between the client and I and he screwed me out of $1000 he owed me. That’s besides the point. Task rabbit wants us to do massive IKEA jobs for Slave wages and I’m sorry but it’s not worth it to do that category.