Advocates and deliveristas say a lot of work remains to be done for their sector, including addressing tipping, lockouts, and transparent scheduling and wage structures.
Delivery workers during a recent protest demanding a fix to New York City’s delivery minimum wage. (Justice for App Workers)
After a long journey from Guinea, Mamadou (a pseudonym) arrived in New York City in November 2023, initially living in shelters in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx. For the last eight months, he has been employed as a delivery worker.
After he applied for asylum, Mamadou’s 180-day wait time started ticking for employment authorization. As soon as he received it, along with his Social Security number, he began renting a bicycle to work delivering food for local restaurants.
Because of its low barriers to entry, delivery work has attracted many recent migrants and asylum seekers, following in the footsteps of other immigrant, working-class people. For African migrants without permanent homes like Mamadou, it also serves as a way out of the city’s often crowded homeless shelters, where migrants have faced 30- and 60-day time limits in recent years.
“It’s not easy to get a job in New York City — you have to have experience,” said Mamadou, who asked that his real name not be used for fear of retaliation from delivery apps and of jeopardizing his asylum application. “They’re going to ask you about a lot of things to get a job.”
While waiting for his work permit to arrive, Mamadou, who speaks French, took English classes.
”But you cannot mix two things,” he said, referring to the difficulty of working and studying at the same time. It was hard for him to know his schedule week to week. “You cannot control what you’re going to get, so I quit school.”
In 2024, the city enacted a new wage formula to ensure that app-based restaurant delivery workers would earn a minimum wage of $17.96 an hour. But delivery app platforms have fiercely resisted the changes — by suing and losing, along with other tactics, workers and advocates say.
These other measures include only offering first-come, first-served work schedules each week, shifting tips to the very last step of the transaction, changing how wages are calculated, deactivating workers’ accounts without notice, and restricting workers’ access to delivery applications.
On April 1, the city’s new minimum wage for app-based restaurant delivery workers went into effect. The latest increase to $21.44 reflects the final phase-in of the city’s plan to raise delivery worker wages, along with an additional inflation adjustment of 7.41 percent.
While the increase is one of several successful battles to improve working conditions and wages for delivery drivers in the wake of the pandemic, workers and advocates say they’re still fighting for transparency on both wages and “lockouts,” in which companies prevent accessing the app during certain times, something workers suspect is intended to reduce the number of hours they have to be paid minimum wage for.
While Mamadou has not had any problems with lockouts, he says that many of his friends have had problems with the apps.
And he has already had issues with the apps’ new policy, adopted after the minimum wage was approved, to move tipping to the end of the order process. “They’re not giving the customer the opportunity to tip us [right away]”, he said, explaining that delivery workers can’t see how much they can earn in tips until they’ve already made the delivery. This puts pressure on workers to take orders as they come in. “If you don’t take it, they [the apps] might dislike you,” he added.
Last week, for example, he earned a mere $5 for a delivery between 14th Street in the East Village and 44th Street in Times Square.
On Wednesday, members of the Justice For App Workers coalition and app workers held a caravan protest in Elmhurst to demand a change in New York City’s minimum wage law and an elimination of lockouts for delivery workers.
Nicki Morris, a spokesperson for Justice for App Workers, said the lockouts have essentially wiped out any benefit of the wage increase, because not being able to access the app is the same as not being able to work.
Advocates and delivery workers said apps have limited when workers can sign on, forcing the more than 60,000 delivery workers to compete and accept orders that come in when they can log into the platforms.
Uber, DashDoor and Relay, major app companies operating in New York City, did not respond to requests for comment by press time.
Gabriel Montero, director of development and communications at the Worker’s Justice Project, an advocacy group for low-wage workers at the helm of the app-based delivery worker organization Los Deliveristas Unidos, said that app companies have “created new and opaque scheduling and pay structures that intensify competition, blocking workers from [freely] reserving shifts.”
While delivery workers have seen an increase under the new minimum wage rules, as part of the new rules, app companies can now choose to pay workers based on individual hours worked or on the cumulative hours by all delivery workers. According to the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, the agency enforcing minimum wage laws, both methods are “designed so that workers, on average, are paid at or above the minimum pay rate when calculated over all hours of work.”
However, app companies are not required to tell workers in advance whether their pay will be calculated using the standard method or the alternative method, leaving workers uncertain about how much they will be paid.
Some of the advocates’ demands have been heard by the City Council, which has introduced Intro 859, requiring app companies to disclose the method that they “anticipate using to calculate food delivery worker pay at the outset of each pay period,” according to the bill’s summary.
Other bills, like Intro 738, would present tipping prompts before or at the same time an online order is placed.
For Mamadou, every dollar has counted as he’s worked to afford housing. “Right now, I’m going to make some money to get out of the shelter and have a place to live,” he remembered saying to himself more than four months ago. Since then, he and several other friends have managed to rent an apartment with the financial help of a New Yorker who offered him odd jobs and the savings of his friends.
Delivering food, along with other odd jobs, has allowed him to survive so far, Mamadou said.
“Sometimes you cannot eat well, but you have to pay your rent,” he said. ”There’s no way [around it]. You can control your stomach, yes. But you cannot control the owner of your house.”
Advocates and delivery workers like Mamadou say much work remains to be done in their sector, including addressing the minimum wage and tips, lockouts, and transparent scheduling, as well as pay structures that would allow deliveristas to regain some control over their lives and health.
“We’re underpaid, we’re underestimated,” Mamadou said. “The increase is helpful, but it cannot solve the problem.”
To reach the reporter behind this story, contact daniel@citylimits.org.
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