Essential help
Protections for delivery workers OKd
Several measures to protect delivery workers were approved Thursday in the City Council, paving the way for almost certain signoff from Mayor de Blasio.
The Council bills seek to ensure the mostly immigrant workforce is granted access to bathrooms at restaurants they deliver food for, receive a minimum wage and have the ability to limit the distance they travel on delivery runs.
“This is a group that’s been historically marginalized and historically disenfranchised, and so we want to make sure that people understand that these are frontline, vital workers that are critical to our city, to our economy,” said Councilwoman Carlina Rivera, one of the bill’s sponsors. “These are people who just want to feed their families and who are keeping this city running.”
App-based delivery services have grown steadily in popularity in recent years, but the pandemic has sent their use through the roof, especially in the Big Apple. In spite of that, delivery workers — or deliveristas, as many call themselves — have worked without basic employment protections for years. If signed into law, the Council bills would change that.
De Blasio has said more than once he’s on board with the bills, and on Thursday before their approval in the Council, he said that hasn’t changed.
“Delivery workers have gone through so much in this crisis, all working people have, and anything we can do to lighten the burden, to make their lives a little easier, to help them recover, we want to do,” he said. “I know the City Council feels that strongly. We’ve been working together on this legislation, and I look forward to supporting it.”
As New Yorkers hunkered down amid COVID, low-wage delivery workers soon became viewed as essential workers. But it was Hurricane Ida, which caused flash floods and more than a dozen deaths, that brought their plight into particularly stark relief with videos of the deliveristas wading through flooded streets, food in tow, to serve people in the comfort of their homes.
Part of the reason deliveristas are paid so little is that food apps hire them as contractors instead of as employees, which has allowed those companies to skirt minimum wage requirements.
To add insult to injury, the workers are often barred from using the bathrooms at the restaurants they deliver food from.
Saul Bazan, an immigrant from Mexico who’s been delivering food through Grubhub for nine months, described employees at restaurants he’d pick up from forbidding him to use their restrooms. Often, he said, people working in-house at those restaurants pretend the toilet is broken.
“When the restaurant is closed to the public, in those situations, you’re not allowed to use the bathroom — even though you’re coming to pick up the food for the customers,” Bazan, 30, said in Spanish through a translator. “Whenever I ask, they say the bathroom is not in service.”
Rivera’s bill would require appbased delivery services ensure the restaurants they do business with make their bathrooms available to delivery workers. If they don’t, restaurants and bars could be fined $50 on the first offense and $100 for subsequent violations.
That bill passed along with five others geared toward deliveristas Thursday.
One, which was sponsored by Councilman Carlos Menchaca (D-Brooklyn), would require food apps to pay workers at least once a week. Another, from Councilman Justin Brannan (D-Brooklyn), would allow workers to set parameters on how far they’ll travel on delivery runs.