Delivering better for everyone

It’s great that the hard-pedalling deliverymen and delivery-women bringing New Yorkers their restaurant orders got a raise yesterday, as their minimum wage climbed to at least $19.56 per hour before tips. The higher earnings floor is the first increase under the relatively new city regulation governing these app-based essential workers, who came through mightily when COVID hit four years ago.

The pay rate is set by the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, which made the announcement with Mayor Adams yesterday.

It’s been a long time coming for a bill that passed the City Council three years ago and we supported. After many delays, it was supposed to start last summer, but lawsuits further delayed the implementation until December. This is the first, inflation-based raise.

However, the method that the city uses to calculate which workers should get what pay gave us some concerns back then. And those concerns may be playing out that the structure of the program could incentivize the big app companies like Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Grubhub to favor those deliveristas who put in a full 40 hours a week, over the more casual couriers. Good for the full-timers, bad for the part-timers. Is that what New York wants?

Since the faster deliveristas would get more orders and more pay, it may make them race to their customers, which is a danger on our crowded streets (and even on our crowded sidewalks). It’s one thing for postal letter carriers having the motto of: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds,” but we don’t want speeding deliverymen on e-bikes and mopeds to be causing crashes and violating traffic rules.

We had suggested that the city Department of Consumer and Worker Protection call their government colleagues at the city Taxi & Limousine Commission, which established a minimum pay regime for Uber and Lyft that works very well for the drivers and the companies. Delivering food via an app is a similar gig business to delivering passengers via an app.

Besides the wage rates (regulated by Consumer and Worker Protection) and traffic and safety issues (the focus of the city Department of Transportation and the NYPD, on enforcement), the Fire Department is desperately trying to stem the deadly fires erupting from e-bikes’ lithium-ion batteries. There are also various other government matters like lack of insurance on the e-bikes and the workers and questions of licenses and training.

And while mopeds already have license plates, should commercial e-bikes also be identifiable? Both the City Council and Albany are looking at that.

Adams had a very smart idea in his State of the City speech in January, creating what he called a new Department of Sustainable Delivery to cover every aspect of this industry, from workers to companies to vehicles (including their dangerous batteries).

We are often skeptical of new bureaucracies, but with this newish world of delivery, the current hodge-podge of regulatory agencies is not a good fit for what has developed organically and created new issues and new problems along with the new services and new opportunities.

Putting it all together under one roof makes sense. The Council should work with the mayor to bring the new agency into reality.