Lawsuit Alleges Gig Economy Companies’ Poor Vetting Resulted In Hit-And-Run Death

On January 12, 2020, around 3:45 am, Tiffany Reed, a 29-year-old Philadelphia woman had just left work as the manager of a local Wendy’s. As she stepped into the crosswalk, a car sped across a major intersection and hit her, throwing her more than 150 feet — half the length of a football field.

The car didn’t stop. Instead it made a DoorDash delivery, according to court records. The driver, Todd Burton, made $16.75 on it. Approximately 13 hours later, Reed was dead.

Just five days later,Burton was on the road again doing food delivery work for DoorDash.

Burton was arrested weeks later on charges including involuntary manslaughter in February 2020, but was soon released on bail. Over the course of the following year, he made 977 more delivers on behalf of DoorDash alone.

Other materials show that in January 2020, Burton had just come off of a two-month suspension of his driver’s license for failing to respond to a traffic citation. Nevertheless he continued to make nearly 300 deliveries during that specific period of not having a license.

These documents are part of a recently-amended lawsuit filed in Philadelphia’s Court of Common Pleas on behalf of Reed’s family against Burton, which now include DoorDash and PostMates. The original suit, which dates back to 2021, was only against Burton and GrubHub.

News of the amended lawsuit was first reported by WPVI-TV Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Lawyers for Reed’s family say that they want to hold these companies accountable for their allegedly poor verification procedures.

“It’s fairly clear that there was no oversight at all,” Robert Miller, one of the attorneys representing the family, told Forbes. “After killing someone, he’s permitted to do [nearly] 1,000 deliveries.”

Legal experts say that such a tragedy underscores how such companies shift accountability away from themselves, given that they consider their drivers to be independent contractors rather than employees for whom they would be directly responsible. While such deadly accidents caused at the hands of gig economy drivers are not unheard of, this instance is particularly notable given how long Burton was allowed to continue driving.

“I’m shocked, I've never heard that somebody could kill a pedestrian and they weren’t yanked,” Lindsey Cameron, a management professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told Forbes. “You see drivers being deactivated for much more minor offenses.”

The lawsuit accuses the former driver and the companies of wrongful death and negligence. (In April 2021, Burton pleaded guilty to a criminal charge of vehicular manslaughter. He has since served jail time, and has been released.)

During his sentencing hearing, Burton said he was “extremely sorry” for causing Reed’s death, and noted that he had picked up food orders from her Wendy's location “plenty of times.”

Neither Burton, nor DoorDash, nor PostMates, which is owned by Uber, responded to Forbes’ requests for comment. However, in a February response to a subpoena, a DoorDash representative stated that Burton was a “bona fide independent contractor.” The company largely objected to the entire contents of the subpoena, only providing a log of Burton’s working hours and payouts.

Katie Norris, a spokesperson for Grubhub, declined to respond to Forbes’ emailed questions, and did express condolences to Reed’s family. Norris added in a statement that Burton is “no longer” driving for the company, adding that “we conduct extensive background checks on the drivers who contract with us.”

DoorDash, like many other gig economy firms, uses Checkr, a background check services company, to vet its drivers. Checkr also did not respond to Forbes’ request for comment.

Since 2018, the company has offered “continuous” monitoring in addition to running checks at the time of onboarding. It is not clear what, if any services, Checkr provided regarding Burton in this instance.

Veena Dubal, a labor law professor at the University of California, Hastings, who has done extensive research on the gig economy, say that because workers are pressured to go faster in order to get paid more, the industry is “rife with accidents.”

“On the one hand, food delivery companies want to keep as many workers on the road as possible so they can quickly and easily meet customer demand,” she wrote in an email.

“On the other hand, this means that each worker is paid very little and through an unpredictable algorithmic allocation of work. Because they are paid by the piece, the faster workers deliver, in theory, the more they earn. Logically, this causes accidents.”

Michael LeRoy, a labor law professor at the University of Illinois, also concurred.

“Given that gig worker performance is measured in quantitative metrics, such as delivery speed, gig companies can argue they lack sufficient knowledge of the risk posed by their drivers,” he said in an email to Forbes. “It is another sad example of how gig work shifts costs and risks in a way that leaves gig companies off the hook.”