Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Gig workers face new roles, competition in pandemic
NEW YORK — There were the two-hour, unpaid waits outside supermarkets when San Francisco first started to lock down, on top of the heavy shopping bags that had to be lugged up countless flights of stairs.
And yet even after signing up for several apps, 39-year-old Saori Okawa still wasn’t making as much money delivering meals and groceries as she did driving for ride-hailing giant Uber before the pandemic struck.
“I started to juggle three apps to make ends meet,” said Okawa, who recently reduced her work hours after receiving unemployment benefits. “It was really hard, because at that time, I could not afford to stay home because I had to pay rent.”
Okawa is one of an estimated 1.5 million so-called gig workers who make a living driving people to airports, picking out produce at grocery stores or providing child care for working parents. Theirs had already been a precarious situation, largely without safeguards such as minimum wage, unemployment insurance, workers compensation, and health and safety protections.
But with the pandemic pummeling the global economy and U.S. unemployment reaching heights not seen since the Great Depression, gig workers are clamoring for jobs that often pay less while facing stiff competition from a crush of newly unemployed workers also attempting to patch together a livelihood — all while trying to avoid contracting the coronavirus themselves.
U.S. unemployment fell to 11.1% in June, a Depression-era level that, while lower than the month before, could worsen after a surge in coronavirus cases has led states to close restaurants and bars.
Marisa Martin, a law school student in California, turned to Instacart when a state government summer job as a paralegal fell through after a hiring freeze.
She said she enjoys the flexibility of choosing her own hours but hopes not to have to turn to gig work in the future. The pay is too volatile — with tips varying wildly and work sometimes slow — to be worth the risk of exposure to the virus.
“We are not getting paid nearly enough when we’re on the front lines interacting with multiple people daily,” said Martin, 24, who moved in with her parents temporarily to save money.
Alexandra LopezDjurovic, 26, was a fulltime nanny in a New York City suburb when one of the parents she works for lost her job while the other saw his hours cut.
“All of a sudden, as much as they want me to stay, they can’t afford to pay me,” she said. Her own hours were reduced to about eight per week.
Lopez-Djurovic charges $30 an hour and coordinates shopping lists over email, offering perks the app companies don’t such as checking the milk’s expiration date before choosing which size to buy. Still, it doesn’t replace the salary she lost.
“One week I might have seven, eight, 10 families I was shopping for,” LopezDjurovic said. “I had a week when I had no money. That’s definitely a challenge.”