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. 

Want to republish this story? Find City Limits’ reprint policy here.

The post City’s Delivery Workers Still Fighting for Reforms, Despite New Minimum Wage appeared first on City Limits.

By JENNIFER PELTZ and MICHAEL R. SISAK, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — As jury selection started on Tuesday in Harvey Weinstein’s New York City rape retrial, some prospective jurors made clear they couldn’t be fair in judging the one-time Hollywood mogul-turned-#MeToo pariah.

Mark Axelowitz, an actor who plays a Manhattan prosecutor in the new Robert De Niro film “The Alto Knights,” was one of more than a dozen candidates who raised a hand when the judge asked if anyone felt they couldn’t be impartial.

“I don’t like the guy, he is a really bad guy,” Axelowitz told a reporter after being dismissed from consideration.

Another dismissed prospective juror disqualified herself because she had previously been sexually assaulted. Yet another said, “I don’t see how anyone can be impartial.”

Former film producer Harvey Weinstein appears in court for his retrial at Manhattan Criminal Court in New York, Tuesday, April 15, 2025. (Steven Hirsch/New York Post via AP, Pool)

Weinstein is being tried again after New York’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, last year overturned his 2020 conviction and 23-year prison sentence and ordered a new trial, finding that improper rulings and prejudicial testimony tainted the original one.

That ruling gave Weinstein a second chance to fight the charges, with his new trial playing out in a different atmosphere than his first trial, which was held in the middle of a global reckoning over sexual misconduct.

Weinstein, 73, who has pleaded not guilty and denies that he raped or sexually assaulted anyone, is older and more frail, in and out of the hospital regularly for a variety of health problems. He’s now far removed from when he was among the most powerful men in the movie business.

Even if he is acquitted, he will not walk free.

Weinstein is also appealing a 2022 rape conviction in Los Angeles. His 16-year prison sentence in that case still stands, though his lawyers said he needs to be resentenced because the since-vacated New York conviction factored into how his punishment was calculated.

Weinstein is being retried on two charges from his original trial. He is accused of raping an aspiring actor in a Manhattan hotel room in 2013 and performing a criminal sex act by forcing oral sex on a movie and TV production assistant in 2006.

He is also charged with one count of criminal sex act based on an allegation from a woman who was not a part of the original trial. That woman, who has asked that she not be named publicly, alleges that Weinstein forced oral sex on her at a Manhattan hotel.

Speaking outside the courthouse on Tuesday, that accuser’s lawyer, Lindsay Goldbrum, said one thing would become “crystal clear” from her client’s upcoming testimony at the trial: “This was not consensual. This was sexual assault with force.”

“I am confident that there will be justice in this case,” Goldbrum told reporters, adding that her client was resolved to testify. “It is important for women everywhere and for people who are victims of sexual assault everywhere that others pave the way and show their dedication in this fight against sexual assault.”

Judge Curtis Farber has set aside at least four days for jury selection and expects opening statements and the start of testimony next week.

The judge, prosecution and defense will work to whittle a massive pool of potential jurors down to the 18 people — 12 jurors and six alternates — needed for the trial by asking questions and seeking to eliminate anyone they feel can’t judge the case fairly.

Selecting a jury will involve bringing in around 80 potential jurors at a time for two basic screening questions. The first group was brought in late Tuesday morning after defense lawyers and prosecutors ironed out some last-minute loose ends.

Along with the question about impartiality, the judge is also asking each group of prospective jurors for a show of hands from anyone who has work, family or other obligations that will prevent them from serving.

Anyone who raises a hand to either question will be sent home, Farber has said.

Those who remain will be seated in or near the jury box, 24 at a time, and asked additional questions about things like their education, work, and whether anyone they know is in law enforcement or has been a victim of a crime.

Prosecutors and Weinstein’s lawyers will each have 40 minutes to question each subset of 24 potential jurors. Often, lawyers will use that time to follow up on things raised in earlier questioning or zero in on concerns about potential biases.

Either side can ask the judge to dismiss a potential juror. If too many jurors are dismissed, another group will be brought in and the process will repeat until the full jury is seated.

By NICHOLAS RICCARDI

President Donald Trump on Monday reiterated that he’d like to send U.S. citizens who commit violent crimes to prison in El Salvador, telling that country’s president, Nayib Bukele, that he’d “have to build five more places” to hold the potential new arrivals.

Trump’s administration has already deported immigrants to El Salvador’s notorious mega-prison CECOT, known for its harsh conditions. The president has also said his administration is trying to find “legal” ways to ship U.S. citizens there, too.

Trump on Monday insisted these would just be “violent people,” implying they would be those already convicted of crimes in the United States, though he’s also floated it as a punishment for those who attack Tesla dealerships to protest his administration and its patron, billionaire Elon Musk. But it would likely be a violation of the U.S. Constitution for his administration to send any native-born citizen forcibly into an overseas prison. Indeed, it would likely even violate a provision of a law Trump himself signed during his first term.

Here’s a look at the notion of sending U.S. citizens to prison in a foreign country, why it’s likely not legal and some possible legal loopholes.

If it’s legal to do to immigrants, why not citizens?

Immigrants can be deported from the United States, while citizens cannot. Deportation is covered by immigration law, which does not apply to U.S. citizens. Part of being a citizen means you cannot be forcibly sent to another country.

Immigrants can be removed, and that’s what’s been happening in El Salvador. The country is taking both its own citizens that the United States is sending as well as those from Venezuela and potentially other countries that will not take their own citizens back from the U.S. The Venezuelans sent there last month had no opportunity to respond to evidence against them or appear before a judge.

That’s the deal the Trump administration signed with Bukele. The U.S. has sent people to El Salvador, Costa Rica, Panama and elsewhere even when they are not citizens of those countries. But, under international agreements, people cannot be sent to countries where they are likely to be persecuted or tortured.

Prisoners look out from their cell at the Terrorist Confinement Center in Tecoluca, El Salvador, Friday, April 4, 2025, during a tour by the Costa Rica Justice and Peace minister. (AP Photo/Salvador Melendez)

Why does the Trump administration want to send people to El Salvador?

Bukele calls himself “the world’s coolest dictator” and has cracked down on human rights during his administration. He’s also turned El Salvador from one of the world’s most violent countries into a fairly safe one. Trump has embraced that example, including during the Oval Office visit Monday.

Sending immigrants from countries like Venezuela to El Salvador sends a message to would-be migrants elsewhere about the risks of trying to make it to — or stay in — the United States.

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There’s a second benefit to the administration: People sent to El Salvador are outside the jurisdiction of United States courts. Judges, the administration argues, can’t order someone sent to El Salvador to be released or shipped back to the U.S. because the U.S. government no longer has control of them.

It’s a potential legal loophole that led Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor to issue a grim warning in her opinion in a 9-0 U.S. Supreme Court finding that the administration could not fly alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador with no court hearing, even after Trump invoked an 18th century law last used during World War II to claim wartime powers.

“The implication of the Government’s position is that not only noncitizens but also United States citizens could be taken off the streets, forced onto planes, and confined to foreign prisons with no opportunity for redress,” Sotomayor warned. She was writing to dissent from the majority taking the case from the federal judge who had initially barred the administration from any deportations and had ordered planes en route to El Salvador turned around — an order the administration apparently ignored.

A second case highlights the risks of sending people to El Salvador. The administration admits it sent a Maryland man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, erroneously to El Salvador. A Salvadoran immigrant, Abrego Garcia, who has not been charged with a crime, had an order against deportation but was shipped to CECOT anyway. On Monday Bukele and Trump scoffed at the idea of sending him back, even though the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the administration to “facilitate” his return.

President Donald Trump, left, greets El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele as Bukele arrives at the White House, Monday, April 14, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

Wait, so can they send citizens to El Salvador?

Nothing like this has ever been contemplated in U.S. history, but it seems unlikely. There are other legal barriers besides the fact that you cannot deport U.S. citizens. The United States does have extradition treaties with several countries where it will send a citizen accused of a crime in that country to face trial there. That appears to be the only existing way a U.S. citizen can be forcibly removed from the country under current law.

The Constitution also prohibits “cruel and unusual punishment,” and one of CECOT’s selling points is that conditions there are far harsher than in prisons in the U.S. As noted above, federal courts have no jurisdiction there, and that may deprive people sent there of the constitutional guarantee of due process of law.

“It is illegal to expatriate U.S. citizens for a crime,” wrote Lauren-Brooke Eisen of the Brennan Center for Social Justice in New York.

She noted that even if the administration tries to transfer federal prisoners there, arguing they’re already incarcerated, it could run afoul of the First Step Act that Trump himself championed and signed in 2018. The provision requires that the government try to house federal inmates as close to their homes as possible so their families can visit them — and indeed transfer anyone housed farther than 500 miles from their home to a closer facility.

One last loophole?

There is one potential loophole that the administration could use to send a small group of citizens to El Salvador. They can try to strip the citizenship of people who earned it after immigrating to the United States.

People who were made U.S. citizens after birth can lose that status for a handful of offenses, like funding terrorist organizations or lying on naturalization forms. They would then revert to green card holders, and would be potentially eligible for deportation if convicted of other, serious crimes.

That’s a small, but real, pool of people. Perhaps the most significant thing about it is that it would require loss of citizenship first. In other words, there’s still likely no legal way to force a citizen out of the country. But a few could end up in legal jeopardy anyway.

Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport has begun maintenance projects involving temporary runway closures that may mean more airplane noise for some areas nearby.

The first phase started on Monday and is expected to continue through May 23, according to the Metropolitan Airport Commission. The second part will be from Aug. 18 to Sept. 26. By doing the project in two phases, the runway — known as R12-30L — will be open to all aircraft for the majority of the peak summer season.

“This work ensures that critical airport infrastructure maintains the highest level of safety for handling aircraft operations and conforms to Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) specifications,” according to MAC officials.

Residents may hear increased air traffic activity overhead due to the change in runway use. Once the work is complete, “the FAA will return MSP to its pre-construction operational patterns,” according to the MAC.

Additional information and updates on the project can be found at the MSP Noise Oversight Committee web page and at the MAC website.

Also, runway use information and flight activity are available on the MAC FlightTracker. And, information about runway closures can be found at metroairports.org/msp-runway-closures.

Those with questions on airfield or aircraft noise or runway closures due to construction can contact the Community Relations Office at 612-726-9411.

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