Today’s News & Commentary—July 21, 2017

The New York City Council passed the country’s first law requiring ride-hailing apps like Uber to offer in-app tipping. New York’s in-app tipping requirement was first proposed to the City’s Taxi and Limousine Commission this spring in a petition by the Independent Driver’s Guild that garnered over 11,000 signatures.

Also this week, Uber’s long-awaited in-app tipping feature, which it announced late last month, went live nationwide.

California’s agriculture industry is turning to automation in an attempt to make up a growing labor shortage. As immigrant farmworkers age, the LA Times reports, they are not being replaced in the workforce. In response, the $47-billion industry has sought to shift from labor-intensive crops to those that can be harvested mechanically.

A new report by the Century Foundation advocates that “it is the time for unions and their allies to return to the rights-based rhetoric and constitutional legal strategies that preceded the passage of the National Labor Relations Act and the development of our current labor law regime.” The report outlines ten rights that should make up labor’s Bill of Rights.

The Upshot has an analysis of the two recent studies on Seattle’s minimum wage. The analysis suggests that the job losses seen in the University of Washington study, which it attributed to the minimum wage increase, might instead “reflect the limitations of studying a single experiment . . . . [S]ome sort of control group is needed.” See some of our previous coverage of the studies here.