Delivering for them

Delivery workers navigate dozens of obstacles to keep New Yorkers fed, from bad weather to below-minimum-wage pay to dangerous streets to a frayed safety net. Fortunately, their lives are poised to get a bit better, thanks to a slate of City Council-passed bills pushed for by Los Deliveristas Unidos, a collective of delivery workers and advocates.

Many of the measures are self-evidently positive. They include, for example, ensuring that couriers have access to the bathrooms at restaurants where they’re making pickups, or can collect their pay on a weekly schedule. Pee and pay: two pretty important things for workers.

When it comes to some of the more complicated provisions, though, the proof will really be in the eating of the pudding. A proposal to establish a minimum per-delivery payment, while noble, will depend heavily on the formula the city develops. As written, the bill directs the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection to study conditions and pay for workers, including a dizzying array of variables such as “expenses of such worker,” “mode of transportation,” “how trips are offered or assigned,” and “information relating to both completed and canceled trips.” It remains unclear if this minimum will be an amount per hour, per trip, or through some other metric.

It’s a more complex version of the calculus that the city had to make when setting minimum payments for ride-hailing services, except now for a workforce that has different types of vehicles, might be making multiple trips at once, and has one more party in the exchange (not just app, driver and passenger, but now app, delivery worker, vendor and recipient). And while the Taxi & Limousine Commission had plenty experience regulating drivers, the DCWP has very little overseeing a workforce.

Once the mayor signs the bill, as he’s expected to, the city must start drawing the rules in a way that doesn’t kill an industry it’s trying to save by drowning it in red tape or pricing customers out of ordering food altogether.