NYC food delivery workers fight for labor rights

Three of the bicycles used by food delivery workers stand alongside the February 14, 2024 rally in Manhattan. Photo: Angel Melgoza.

Reportage • Ángel Melgoza • February 15, 2024 • Leer en castellano

Ernesta Gálvez pedals down the street on a damp and cloudy morning. She works making deliveries on her bicycle, and New York City’s unpredictable weather is just one of the things that makes her job difficult.

Being a deliverista—a food delivery worker—means dealing with danger in the streets, physical fatigue, and precarity. The morning I spoke to Gálvez, she had traveled for nearly two hours, by train and boat with bicycle in tow, to get to work. Born in Tlapa, Guerrero, she has lived in New York for the last 18 years. 

"We come here with whatever resources we’ve got. I finished nursing school before I came. No one tells us what things are really like," said Gálvez. "They are not as they seem or as you’d imagine."

When her third child was born, Gálvez found her job at a laundromat increasingly untenable. It was far from where she lived, with long hours and low pay. She had worked there for years, but wanted more time with her children. Her ex-husband suggested she try food delivery.

The possibility of having greater control over her schedule and earning more money convinced her, even though she was an inexperienced cyclist. She soon became one of few female delivery workers, and her sense of justice thrust her into the tense world of labor rights activism.

Food delivery and the long wait for asylum

There are an estimated 65,000 food delivery workers in New York City. Business boomed during the pandemic, when much of the city was staying indoors and delivery workers were considered essential workers. 

The number of undocumented migrants employed as delivery workers is unknown. Approximately 110,000 migrants have arrived in New York City over the last year and a half and about 10,000 more arrive every month. Most are from Latin America and the Caribbean. 

Migrants or asylum seekers have to earn money, but most jobs require papers. According to US immigration law, asylum seekers are not eligible for formal employment for 180 days after submitting their application for asylum. 

This bureaucratic limbo created a goldmine of low-cost workers for food delivery apps. On the streets, it’s obvious: everywhere you look, there are Latinos on bicycles delivering food. 

Some have papers, others don’t. Sometimes migrants pay legal residents to use their documents or accounts on the apps. They rent scooters, motorcycles or bicycles to navigate the streets of an enormous, confusing city, often working in an unfamiliar second language.

Ernesta Galvez, deliverista and activist, during the February 14, 2024 rally in Manhattan. Photo: Ángel Melgoza.

Violence, precariousness and organization

During the pandemic, delivery workers faced great danger and an avalanche of discrimination. Restaurants where they picked up food barred them from using bathrooms, thieves robbed and harassed them, and there were reports of police intimidation. 

This prompted a small group of food delivery workers to organize a sit-in outside of a police station on October 8, 2020. This was the start of their organization, which grew from there and soon became a visible force.

On October 15, 2020, delivery workers marched to demand job security. Approximately eight hundred deliveristas participated, a number that surprised even the event’s organizers. That first march led to the creation of Deliveristas Unidos, the most prominent organization of Latino delivery workers in New York City. 

Gustavo Ajché, a Guatemalan construction worker and deliverista, told Radio Ambulante that, after the first march, he was asked, "Who are you? What do you call yourselves?" He answered with the name of the delivery workers’ WhatsApp group: “Deliveristas Unidos.”

It was Ajché who pushed for continued mobilization after the first sit-in in front of the police station. 

Ajché came to the US in 2004. He organized newly arrived day laborers at the Worker’s Justice Project (WJP), which also allowed him to learn about job opportunities. 

Ajché was soon being sent to churches and other community spaces to promote the WJP’s work. He became sort of a public figure and it was partly because of this that he began speaking to the press after the delivery workers’ first labor actions in 2020. 

The Worker’s Justice Project was founded by Ligia Guallpa, an Ecuadorian woman raised in the Bronx. She founded the Center to educate, organize and fight to improve working conditions for New York’s undocumented workers. 

Deliveristas Unidos, working with Guallpa’s organization, soon began pushing a legislative package in the city that consisted of a set of six laws that would regulate delivery apps and restaurants. The goal was to improve working conditions for delivery workers. 

Delivery workers had just begun organizing when tragedy struck. On March 29, 2021, delivery worker Francisco Villalba Vitino was taking a break at Poor Richard's Playground in East Harlem, Manhattan. Someone tried to steal his electric bicycle, which cost more than US$1700. In the struggle that ensued, the thief shot and killed him. 

Villalba Vitino’s murder enraged delivery workers. Prompted by this and ongoing robberies, acts of intimidation, and other acts of violence, more than 3,000 deliveristas took to the streets of Manhattan. 

They marched and pedaled from Times Square to New York’s City Hall. It was the first time that number of delivery workers had ever taken to the streets. They made noise, played loud protest music and shouted slogans. 

Approximately three thousand deliveristas took the streets of Manhattan on April 21, 2021. The demonstration covered more than five kilometers in Manhattan, from Times Square to New York City Hall. Photo © Heriberto Paredes.

Public pressure continued to grow. In September 2021, New York’s city government passed laws compelling restaurants in the city to allow delivery workers to use their bathrooms and establishing a minimum wage for them. 

Since then, the issue of minimum wage has become a central tension in a pitched battle between representatives of Deliveristas Unidos and other rank-and-file delivery workers. As time went on, another question began to emerge about the organization that claims to represent them: where did the money donated to the Worker’s Justice Project on behalf of the deliveristas end up? 

Large donations, little transparancy

Gálvez participated in the April 2021 protest and later joined Deliveristas Unidos. She believed the organization would allow her to do more for her fellow workers, including supporting them if they had an accident. But, she says, that didn’t happen. 

"There’s no money, tell them there’s no money," were the words Gálvez heard from her superiors when she asked for funds to support injured colleagues. 

In June 2022, Gálvez stopped working for Deliveristas Unidos and became a critic of the organization. In an interview with Ojalá, she said there is no accountability for the resources that were collected on behalf of the deliverista cause. 

Along with many other deliveristas, Gálvez says the city government and Deliveristas Unidos (via the WJP) promote policies that disadvantage the very people that they claim to help. 

On March 31, 2023, hundreds of delivery workers gathered in Union Square Park to march to City Hall. Their demand: that Ligia Guallpa and the Worker’s Justice Project clarify what has been done with the money it received.

Ajché of Deliveristas Unidos told Ojalá funds received are earmarked for specific projects or purposes and that there is no money to support the families of the deliveristas when they are injured on the job. 

One Deliveristas Unidos member, Antonio Martinez, created a donation campaign online after being in an accident. Ajché and Martinez say helping injured delivery workers isn’t the focus of Deliveristas Unidos. "If it did that, it wouldn’t have enough resources," said Ajché. Martinez agrees, and says doing so should fall to the companies that profit from the delivery business.

What there have been resources for is the construction of a "delivery hub headquarters" in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood. The hub will include a battery charging station and bike repair shop, and it is imagined as "a space for workforce development and rights training," according to a report in The New York Times.

This center will cost $1.7 million. In January 2023, the Workers Justice Center said it had already raised $1.5 million. But from where? 

Guallpa has publicly stated that she isn’t hiding anything, but has not provided access to relevant financial documents. We were able to find some information because the Worker’s Justice Project uses Third Sector New England, Inc., an allied organization that is authorized to receive and disburse grants and makes annual declarations online.

In 2022, the WJP had a total revenue of $3,068,000, nearly double the $1,560,000 it brought in two years prior. In 2019, the Worker’s Justice Project declared net assets totaling $219,000, three years later that had risen tenfold to $2,180,000. 

In terms of employee salaries and benefits, it went from spending $621,000 in 2019 to paying $1,128,000 in 2022, an increase of over 80 percent.

Deliveristas Unidos are not the WJP’s only project, but the increase in funding in parallel with increased public demonstrations and a larger profile on the part of deliveristas is striking. Ojalá tried to speak with Guallpa on multiple occasions to request an interview, but she suggested we speak with her collaborators Ajché and Martínez instead. Both men said they were not appraised of the details of the organization’s funding.

Juan Solano speaks as Octavio Lopez looks on during the February 14, 2024 rally. Both are food delivery workers in Manhattan. Photo © Ángel Melgoza.

Deliveristas vs. minimum wage

In June of last year, the Mayor of New York announced the new minimum wage for delivery workers with great fanfare, explicitly thanking Guallpa and Deliveristas Unidos. The measures he announced went into effect in December of last year.

Companies are now required to pay $17.96 per hour, a figure which will rise to $19.96 by 2025. The law sets out two payment modalities: one is to pay $17.96 per hour inclusive of the entire time a worker is connected to the application; the other is to pay $29.93 per hour for the time it takes to make a delivery only. In the second scenario, delivery workers are not paid for the time spent waiting for orders. 

In July 2023, the companies that own Uber, DoorDash, Grubhub and Relay sued the city. They claimed that the minimum wage will hurt restaurants, consumers, and delivery drivers, who would need to be more closely monitored to calculate the exact hours worked while logged into the app. 

In December, delivery apps in New York began to make changes to how payments are made on their platforms related to minimum wage requirements. Gálvez says that now DoorDash only pays for the time a delivery driver spends picking up an order and taking it to the delivery point. And Uber Eats and DoorDash both changed when consumers are prompted to tip delivery drivers, which now takes place after checkout. 

Migrants say that after all the marches, public pressure and new minimum wage legislation, delivery apps began preventing them from working. They are blocked from the apps if they do not have a US Tax Identification Number, which many lack. This means they cannot collect the money they earned, which is stored in the app. Sometimes this can be as much as $9,000 or $10,000, which, Gálvez says, can be lost completely. 

To avoid being locked out of the app and to keep working, hundreds of delivery workers continue to organize in WhatsApp groups, on Facebook, and in the streets of New York. They are now asking the city government to drop the minimum wage initiative.

Gálvez became visibly upset when she recalled what happened on May 5, 2023, the day of the Battle of Puebla, which is the largest Mexican celebration in the United States. Thousands of workers were locked out of the applications that day. "We are so essential that most of the deliveristas were locked out of the apps; so essential that we became disposable," said Gálvez. "We were tossed out like trash." 

Over the last few weeks, Gálvez has been earning less than half of what she made before December. An upstart movement of deliveristas organized a Facebook group called Repartidores de Guerra [Deliverers of War] and is now ready to protest again. Their demand: that Deliveristas Unidos stop claiming to represent them and that New York City’s minimum wage for delivery workers be dropped.