‘Suit up for the backlash!’: The battle to regulate New York’s gig economy
Two years ago, Brad Lander, arguably the second most powerful official in New York City, rode a bike six times around the perimeter of City Hall. Inside, his colleagues were debating a bill to institute a minimum wage for food delivery riders. Lander, now comptroller of New York, had joined a convoy of delivery drivers in support of a protest for basic rights and fair pay.
“They did six times around because there were six pieces of legislation,” Lander says, who as comptroller oversees New York’s mayoral budget. “I thought it should have been seven, because that’s how many times they went around Jericho in the Bible.”
In June, New York became the first US city to establish a permanent minimum hourly wage for food delivery workers. Lander was the lead sponsor of the originating bill, which he first wrote in 2021 as a council member, before he was elected comptroller.
Change has come slowly. The new wage law was supposed to come into effect on 1 January this year, but was delayed for six months – which Lander attributes to gig companies’ lobbying. The proposed rate was also lowered: from $23.82 (£18.40) an hour by 2025, to $19.96 by 2025.
But last Thursday, days before the new wage took effect, four gig work companies – Uber, DoorDash, Grubhub and Relay – sued the city of New York to block the new law. Manhattan supreme court judge Nicholas Moyne temporarily delayed the start of the landmark minimum wage. It is now unclear when it will come into effect.
“You got to know that the gig companies are going to come strong against this,” Lander told the Guardian on the day the lawsuit was announced. Outside, it was hot and muggy. New York had seen a string of 30C days; a few weeks earlier, the city’s delivery riders had worked through heavy smoke and smog. That morning, Lander had found out about the lawsuit through the press. His advice to other legislators or politicians who are trying to regulate the gig economy is “suit up for the backlash”.
“They’re skilled political players,” he says. “They make a lot of campaign contributions. They hire the right lobbyists. They threaten that the service will collapse or they won’t stay in New York City.”
Lander, a progressive who was endorsed in the comptroller race by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, says that even the announced wage was lower than it should be. His office has estimated that the take-home pay for delivery riders will start out at only $12.69 an hour, rather than $19.96. This shortfall is in part due to a two-year “phase-in” period that knocks the hourly rate down by $2 to $17.96 – but also because of a provision that gig workers will be paid $3.60 less an hour if they engage in “multi-apping” – using more than one app at a time to find work.
Lander describes the concept of “multi-apping” as “made up”. “I do struggle to explain why it’s total bullshit,” he says, “because once they make up regulatory words, it sounds like it makes sense. But it’s just total bullshit.
“There’s no time when more than one app is paying a worker. That never happens. When you’re on a trip, one app is paying for you. They used the idea of multi-apping to just cut the hourly rate by three bucks an hour. It’s a fancy way to pay their workers less.”
Vilda Vera Mayuga, the head of New York’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, which determined the $17.96 rate, says she is “extremely disappointed” at the gig companies’ lawsuit. “These apps currently pay workers far below the minimum wage,” she says.
Grubhub says it was “pleased” with the decision to delay the law. An Uber spokesperson says the company wants to “figure out a minimum pay rule that doesn’t have devastating consequences for couriers, consumers and restaurants”.
The political will to improve delivery riders’ lives, Lander says, came largely from the pandemic. At the start of 2020, riders were often not even allowed to use the bathrooms of the restaurants they were delivering from.
Los Deliveristas Unidos, a workers’ rights group for delivery ridersformed during the pandemic, delivered a series of proposed reforms to politicians including Lander, a city council member at the time. Initially, the riders did not imagine a minimum wage was possible. “They had an initial package of legislation to just confront the worst abuses,” Lander says.
But in 2019, New York had already established a minimum wage law for rideshare drivers, in which Lander had been involved. This became a model for the food delivery riders who, in the pandemic, were becoming essential.
Dozens of delivery riders have also been killed at work. They have been hit by cars, stabbed, assaulted and shot. In 2021, Francisco Villalva Vitinio, a 29-year-old migrant from Mexico, was murdered by someone who was trying to steal his e-bike. Villalva Vitinio had moved to the US 10 years earlier, and had worked in a restaurant until he lost his job at the start of the pandemic.
Lander and the future mayor, Eric Adams, attended a funeral service and protest for Villalva Vitinio, and Lander remembers it being a turning point. “There was so much grief in the community,” he says. “Real agony and grief over this loss, but also just anger – we were saying these are essential workers, but just not protecting them from real physical harm and death, and not paying or treating them with dignity.”
Gig companies have claimed that the new law will disrupt the food delivery in New York, and force higher prices on to consumers. A spokesperson for DoorDash, Eli Scheinholtz, says the wage was an “extreme earnings standard” that would have “harmful and lasting impacts … that resulted from a fundamentally broken process”.
Lander says that New York’s minimum wage for rideshare drivers was also delayed by a court challenge, from Lyft. “But it finally got implemented,” he says, “and it’s worked great. Drivers make several thousand more dollars a year, can earn a living wage, and can feed their families.”
The next step, he says, is to roll out minimum wage laws to other cities. Lander is part of a national network of progressive elected officials called Local Progress.
But he admits it can be hard to hold on to regulatory changes in the face of lobbying. In 2019, the California legislature passed a bill classifying rideshare drivers as employees, but it was overturned by ballot measure Proposition 22, a referendum in which Uber, Lyft and other rideshare and food delivery apps such as DoorDash spent about $200m campaigning. “Uber and Lyft bought the referendum,” Lander says. “Even if you do win hearts and minds, these gains can be overturned.”
But in New York, Lander and other politicians are not yet done. There is a bill before the city to grant sick leave to gig workers, written by Lander’s successor on the council, Shahana Hanif.
Lander is also supporting a bill from council member Tiffany Cabán called the Secure Jobs Act, which would protect employees from unfair dismissal. He wants to see similar protections for gig workers, who can often be barred from the apps they use to find work due to poor ratings or factors that he says are opaque and obscure.
Due to the legal action, New York’s minimum wage is still on hold. But even in its current state, Lander says, the law doesn’t go far enough. “It is still, on average, a sub-minimum wage … and even that’s not enough for [the gig companies],” he says. “Having captured the relevant regulatory process, cut workers hourly wages by about four bucks an hour, they’re still suing to overturn it altogether. That’s not surprising. Their whole model is built on exploiting their workforce. That’s what gig work largely is.”
We were saying these are essential workers, but just not protecting them from harm and not treating them with dignity
Brad Lander