NY passes bills to improve delivery worker conditions

The New York City Council passing a slate of bills that's aimed to improve working conditions for delivery workers. Now what's included in this bill, it includes things like bathroom access, minimum pay, among a list of other protections.

Let's talk about what this means and if other cities could potentially follow suit. We want to bring in Alexandrea Ravenelle, UNC assistant professor and author of "Hustle and Gig, Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy." Professor, it's good to see you. This looks like it's a critical step forward here for so many of the thousands of delivery workers here in New York City. Well, it's great to be on and talking about this.

I think this is really setting a major precedent for other cities. I'm not surprised to see that New York is very much leading the way on these workplace protections for the couriers. You know, ever since the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911, New York has led the country in terms of trying to address the plight of workers in dangerous professions.

Professor, it might be helpful, too, for people who are watching to understand some of the egregious behavior that has taken place that's jeopardized these men and women who deliver stuff, such as they have to pay a fee to collect their wage. I mean, can you give us more examples? Because that's not right.

That seems really astounding. So typically, these workers are told that they can get paid once a week without any fees. But they're being paid so little for each of these deliveries that in many cases, they need the money from each delivery in order to put gas in their cars or to buy themselves even a sandwich for lunch.

And so we're seeing that workers are cashing out sometimes multiple times each day for only a couple of dollars each time because that's what they need to even continue working. And so in many cases, they're getting hit with several dollars in fees every day that comes directly out of the money that they're making. Professor, you've certainly done a lot of work within this sector. I guess, from your perspective, do these bills go far enough? Or are more protections needed down the line? Yeah, so these bills are a really great floor, but they're not enough.

We're still going to need to see additional changes. For instance, these workers are still not classified as W-2 employees. And so if they get injured on the job, they're not qualifying for workers' comp in many cases. Except for under the CARES Act, they don't normally get unemployment insurance.

So this is a good start by providing them with access to bathrooms and a minimum wage, but we need to see more. We also need to see these policies being applied to other workers, like Instacart workers and shift workers, individuals who, in many cases, have many of the same challenges as these food workers.

In the case of the delivery workers, is it is there a business model, though, that would allow them to be a full-time kind of employee with health benefits that is sustainable? Because I don't run a restaurant. I would imagine a lot of restaurant owners, it's not sustainable. Should someone be expecting to support a family of four as a delivery worker?

That's a good question, right? One of the challenges that's coming here with these platforms is that in many cases, they've marketed this as entrepreneurship for all and as a flexible way to work and still take care of your family.

But at the same time, even though they're taking they're charging restaurants a lot of money to be on these platforms and they're taking a portion of what the restaurants would otherwise profit from, they're not paying the workers very well. And so the workers are only getting paid a couple of dollars of delivery.

We know that the workers can be paid more because a lot of times, platforms will offer surge pricing, or they'll offer quests, or they'll offer bonuses with guaranteed wages. So these are things that they are doing on occasion when it serves the platforms well. And these bill-- this bill is hoping to make this a more permanent thing, making it easier for workers to have more transparency about what they're making and how often they're going to be making it.

Professor, when it comes to the companies that this affects so it's UberEats, it's DoorDash, it's Grubhub, just to name a few are there any of these companies that you think have done a better job than some of their peers, just in terms of offering these gig workers some of the protections or some of the incentives that they should be getting at this point?