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Brian: Brian Lehrer on WNYC and with the cold weather setting in and the pandemic waging on the idea of outdoor dining as an alternative to indoor dining is becoming less and less enticing, right? It seems there's no better time for staying in and ordering takeout, but what does it take to get food delivered straight to your door? Better yet who's out there biking miles in the cold to make sure your food is still hot when it arrives.

Since the start of the pandemic, New York City delivery workers have been working overtime often without bathroom access or shelter from the cold. Worker frustrations with delivery apps and the restaurant industry aren't new. Compounded with the pandemic delivery workers are reaching their limits and fighting back in new ways.

Now, many of the workers who in New York are mostly of indigenous Guatemalan and Mexican descent are part of an informal network called Los Deliveristas Unidos, the United Delivery Workers. Though they become the backbone of the restaurant industry and the pandemic. They're not supported by the city or the apps they work under like DoorDash and Relay.

With me now to discuss her latest reporting on the delivery worker, industry's fight for better treatment and the city government's response to it. Is Josefa Velasquez, senior reporter for the news website called The City. Ligia Guallpa, executive director of the organizing group the Workers Justice Project who's been advising the delivery workers on their labor push since this past summer. Ligia and Josefa, welcome to WNYC today. Thank you so much for coming on.

Ligia: Thank you for having us.

Josefa: Thank you.

Brian: Josefa, can you background people who don't know them already a little bit about the deliveristas. In your article, one of them describes a specific group within the delivery workers as clannish and says they like to stay together. Can you give us some big picture background?

Josefa: Sure. A lot of these mostly men are the guys that we see every single day on mostly e-bikes they deliver our sushi, our pizza, our bagels. A lot of these folks have settled in the Bensonhurst area of Brooklyn. They come from Guatemala and Mexico. Funny enough when we met with some of them. They kept on calling each other primo hermano, basically meaning son or a cousin, brother.

It turns out that half of them were actually extended family. Like many immigrants came here to New York for a better future and then another family member came. It's this sprawling network of family members and relatives and family friends who have really taken the lead on delivering our food, especially during the pandemic.

Brian: Ligia, you're quoted saying, "It's a slap in the face to workers when describing companies like DoorDash and similar food delivery apps profiting in the pandemic." Can you describe the disparity that exists between these companies and their delivery workers?

Ligia: Yes. Food delivery workers have been, as Josefa said feeding every single New Yorker with literally no workers' rights protections. While these companies have been thriving and profiting and making billions of dollars. Workers have been earning literally less than minimum wage with no health and safety protections and without any safety net to be able to survive a economic crisis that they had to face because of coronavirus

Brian: Beyond securing livable wages and obtaining full tips, Josefa because wage theft of tips has been one of the issues here. Your article cites many demands that delivery workers have and proposals that they're making and their list is long. Which ones, again, for listeners unfamiliar with these conflicts, would you say are a priority?

Josefa: The first one is an access to bathrooms. It's a very simple things that as a consumer you don't necessarily think about. Because these delivery workers are neither employed by the restaurant, which is how it used to be. Restaurants used to have a delivery person on staff who had earned wage, who was employed by the restaurant who would have to pay workers comp and unemployment. Now, they're not employed by the restaurant and they're not employed by these third party apps either.

They're in this gray area of an independent contractor. There aren't afforded the same protections as employees. Access to a bathroom has become critical, especially now with the pandemic still going on. Public bathrooms have all been shuttered and restaurants trying to keep the number of people in doors small aren't allowing a lot of these workers access to a bathroom. That's been on the top of their list as well as trying to figure out ways to get better representation and wage theft be curbed.

Brian: Listeners, I wonder if we have any food delivery workers listening right now, if we happen to 646-435-7280, if you are a deliversta so to speak, give us a call 646-435-7280. I realized in some of the article that a lot of the deliveristas who are in many cases relatively new arrivals from Guatemala and Mexico, don't speak English so there may be limited ability to hear the show and call into the show. My invitation will extend also to anybody else who works in a restaurant that does take out, or anybody who works for one of the apps and weigh in on this. What does economic justice look like for the deliveristas?

With our guests Ligia Guallpa who is executive director of the organizing group, the Worker's Justice Project who represents deliveristas and Josefa Velásquez senior reporter for the news website, The City who's been reporting on them. 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280. Ligia where does city policy come in, as opposed to just public pressure on the restaurants and the apps to treat the workers fairly. Because I see that council member Carlina Rivera has contacted your group, according to Josefa's has article. Are there legislative plans to address these issues?

Ligia: Yes. There's a lot of power that politicians and consumers have when it comes to regulating these apps that are profiting out of the labor of food delivery workers who happen to be mostly immigrant workers. I just want to make sure that we highlight some of those specific demands that the deliveristas have at the moment. One has been access to bathrooms, but there were a couple other critical demands that they also want to see.

One is a living wage plus a hazard paid, safety protections and access to a safe place where they can eat and stay warm and the right to organize. The reason they're asking for this specific five simple demands. Is because they have been feeding every single New Yorker without access to this five demands that they believe are the most basic human being rights that a worker and a human being should have.

At the moment while workers who are organizing with Workers Justice Project have been lifting up what their demands are. We have heard from policy-makers that are interested in drafting aspecific legislative proposals about access to bathrooms, wages, guaranteeing a safe space. Which for the deliveristas and Workers Justice Project are short-term solutions. We believe that these are the temporary solutions to address what the library workers are facing in the midst of the pandemic, but are not enough.

At the end of the day workers are building a strong organizing movement that they believe much more is needed. There is long-term solutions that are needed at the moment in order to regulate an industry that it's profiting by miaclassifying workers as independent contractors. But at the same time, rewriting the labor laws to prevent them from acting to have access to basic protections, which is health and safety, rights to a minimum wage, and the right to organize as workers.

Brian: Let's take a phone call. Daniel on Long Island. You're on WNYC. Hi Daniel.

Daniel: Hi, how are you?

Brian: Good. You have an experience for us, right?

Daniel: Yes, Sir. I have.

Brian: Go ahead.

Daniel: I used to do deliveries for one of this apps. In the beginning it was okay, money and everything. If you really put everything into perspective, all the hours that you put in, the mileage and all the money in gas and everything, it really doesn't come out too much. You probably make more money working on the regular jobs, $7 an hour than what you make in these places. A set of tires cost $500 and everything. These places you go and you do a delivery for 20 minutes. Sometimes they just give you a $5 for it or $6 to do a delivery that that's pretty much what you spend in gasoline time and basic maintenance for the car.

Brian: Daniel, thank you very much. Ligia, I don't know if you organize people in the suburbs as well as in the city. In the city we think about the delivery workers on their e-bikes for the most part. In the suburbs, like in Daniel's case on Long Island, he has to get in a car and drive somewhere so he's got the gasoline expenses in addition to everything else. Are the issues the same or different? Are you involved with suburban delivery workers?

Ligia: Workers Justice Project is mostly a city-based organization. We are one of the worker centers that have been organizing day laborers, domestic workers. It's specifically workers who are mostly immigrants and have never had the opportunity to join a labor union. The reality is that the gig companies are profiting from everyone.

There have been studies that have actually indicated that 30% of the people in the US are working in the gig economy. It's a new economy that is literally profiting, I would say from desperate unemployed and struggling workforce. In the midst of the pandemic, what we have seen is that what these gig companies have actually built this profits from has been from within New York City. Actually most of their driving income comes from New York City.

In 2015 it was highlighted that it was 50,000 actually delivery workers. We believe that the number has doubled and the reason for that is because food delivery has kept growing and growing and it keeps growing actually in inner cities. Deliveristas are I think one of the most powerful and impactful with a group of leaders of Workers Justice Project that we're organizing. Is that they see this as a movement, that they don't want to fight alone.

They want to build solidarity across with many other gig workers that are out there. Because they strongly believe that together they can literally challenge the power of big tech companies. That continue to profit from their labor and are completely erasing, basically labor law protections that were designed to protect them in crisis, like the one that we're facing at the moment.

Brian: I should mention that other people are calling in to say they too deliver using a car, not a bike. John in Brooklyn is calling to say, he works for Uber Eats and uses a car, not a bike in the city, not just in the suburbs. Luis in Jersey we're going to try to get to you. Another one, like that who's now an organizer. Let's go next to Julio in the East village. Julio you're on WNYC. Hi there.

Julio: Good morning, Sir, good morning. I'm blown away that it's taken so long for anyone to bring this topic up because as of us, restaurant owners and restaurants in general are suffering right now. People that not only have been suffering just as much or maybe as worse and on the front lines are the delivery guys. They're taken advantage of by these huge corporations, the Grubhub's, the delivery.coms and all these things, the DoorDash and whatnot. Because they treat the majority of them as independent contractors, but they give them no protections.

During the height of the pandemic on the first wave, a big chunk of the people that got sick, who are the delivery guys and they're going from home-to-home, and they still are doing that. You would think that there would be some safety protocol for them that the city would put out to mandate that their employers or whatever you want to call them, provide them with mask and this, that the other. It's like they're treated as independent contractors so they don't get any of these things.

Brian: What's the relationship between them and you, as I gather from what you said, you're a restaurant owner.

Julio: The relationship with us is at a minimum because we basically have to use these services right now to survive. Because we chose to stop doing deliveries and our business, for example, over two years ago, because the exorbitant amount of money that we were paying to all these companies. The percentage was sometimes 30% so we were not making any money.

On top of that, we hired our own delivery people because sometimes they wouldn't be on time with the drivers that they would send as they call them. The guy in a bike, they call him a driver, so we had to stop, but now during the pandemic, we had have to restart. The city council originally was only going to cap a 10%, what a restaurant owner was going to have to pay to these apps services.

Then for whatever reason, at the last minute, it went up to 20%. It was an excuse that, "Oh, wait, we have to pay fair wages to the people that answer the phones and to the delivery persons." As you can see right now, the delivery persons they're treated as independent contractors, so they don't get a fair wage. The people that answer the phones for these services, the majority of them are in another country or another state so it's not like people in New York are benefiting from this.

Brian: . Julio, thank you for all of that. We really appreciate it. This is WNYC FM, HDNAM New York, WNJT-FM 88.1 Trenton, WNJP 88.5 Sussex, WNJY 89.3 Netcom, WNJO 90.3 Toms River. We are New York and New Jersey public radio, a few more minutes pulling back the veil on what really goes on with the delivery workers.

Who, if you haven't thought about it and they come to your door are in these particular economic and safety situations as being revealed in a series of articles on the news website, The City. Josefa Velásquez from The City is with us along with Ligia Guallpa who's executive director of the organizing group, the Workers Justice Project. Let me go right onto another call Luis in Jersey you're on WNYC. Hello, Luis.

Luis: Hi, Brian, first-time caller long time listener. I was a delivery driver for about seven years when I was in college and grad school. Now, funny enough, I'm a union organizer so this segment is of a lot of interest to me. The perils of the job are numerous. I towed the car when I was driving due to the inclement weather. You're putting yourself at risk going into people's homes that you don't really know.

I wanted to bring attention to in the United Kingdom, they have an app there called Deliveroo, which is similar to a DoorDash or Grubhub. Their workers actually formed a union. Now I'm not too sure if they had collective bargaining rights there, I'm not well-versed in UK labor law. They might have formed it through a public pressure and direct action and I wanted to bring that to the attention of the deliveristas here in New York.

Brian: Very good. Thank you very much. Let me take one more before we get a response from our guests, Trevor in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi Trevor. Thank you for calling in.

Trevor: Hey, Brian, thanks for having me. Oh, I think this is a great topic I told you a screener. I am a delivery driver and I have been for many years. I've decided with a group of others that we would form our own delivery company. Basically what you have, the problem here is it's larger than just when you look at the individual drivers. You're talking about a economic model where the founders and owners at these apps, they are so disconnected from the drivers.

Our model, our approach is that everyone from the founder to the drivers get the same wage. I drive and I also run the company, and this way I know the impact, I know the feeling, I drove through the pandemic. I've been driving for years, and I know what it is. We pay a minimum of 22.50 at a two hour minim and this is something or you're going restart, that's a minimum and you can also get $5 per delivery.

What we are doing, we launched in something called the freedom market, and it's a community approach where people in our community, they purchase products from local stores. This way we could keep the model, the loop, the money within the community and pay our drivers more. I think you have to look at the larger picture. These apps are based on greed, are based on equity and bringing wealth to the founders and the shareholders. Until you resolve that issue, you will always have this problem with the haves and the have nots [crosstalk].

Brian: Trevor, is there a way with your egalitarian business model that people can favor your delivery over another, if they're ordering food from anywhere?

Trevor: Yes. Well, what we do now is something that we're just building. What we are looking for are shops, the shops that work with us, you can find them on our platform. You could go to freeyourarms.shop and you can support these local businesses. You could buy from them and you will see whatever you're transacting they donate into a pool that goes to funding the underemployed and unemployed workers.

It's new assumption that grew out of the pandemic and out of a group that we call the [unintelligible 00:22:00] Gathering that people may have heard of. We're building that model in and it's a community built up platform, nobody owns it, it's a decentralized model. Hopefully, over the course of the next few months, in the next few years, we can have some real traction here and build something that you can pay the workers. I work, I drive, I'm doing a delivery now, I pulled over [unintelligible 00:22:24].

Brian: I'm glad you got on and just say the name of the platform one more time, because I didn't get it, so probably other people didn't get it, say it real slow.

Trevor: It's Free Your Arm. Just go to freedommarket.shop.

Brian: Freedom market?

Trevor: Yes. Support those businesses. With each delivery from that platform, we send out drivers and we try to, it's small now, but as we build, we hope to have more drivers that can get paid fairly and get fair wages.

Brian: Trevor, good luck with it. I hope it works really well for you and for other drivers, freedommarket.shop, he said. All right, we're almost out of time. Josefa, where does this go from here? Besides people now airing their grievances, more publicly than before, and maybe getting attention. Thanks in part to your reporting more than before. Then I'm going to ask Ligia for a tip about tipping. Josefa, your last word first, real brief.

Josefa: Sure. DoorDah, went public yesterday and its company is valued at 60.2 billion. At the same time workers say, in order to buy a share, they'd have to work upwards of two days to be able to afford it. At this point, workers want to seat at the table to talk to policy makers so they better understand their needs.

Right now, you have a lot of council members and state lawmakers who are mulling ways to try to have some of the demands met. Really what these workers want is their input to be taken into account and some task force. Where they can show policymakers and show people in Albany City Council, what it's like to be a worker and how to draft legislation and policies that will benefit them.

Brian: Ligia a few people are asking about tips, if you give somebody a cash tip, is that better than adding X percent or X dollars on an app?

Ligia: Yes. There's a couple of things that I think, we all can do to support delivery workers who are in the frontline. One, in tips, there's a couple of things that need to happen. One, there is, if you're going to tip through the app, just guaranteeing calling the app or sending a message about the need to make sure that the tips are directly going to the workers. Also, we highly encourage, to be careful to tip in cash, sometimes workers preferred to be tipped by cell, just because they're also exposed to crime.

The second way you can also support, I think it is important is that, Deliveristas Unidos are building an organizing movement, and they're trying to build an organizing worker led campaign. In times like this, I think we need workers rights organizing movements to confront the power of these companies. Also feel free to support. We have created a campaign that is called Fund Workers, which will be used to provide the tools necessary that the Deliveristas Unidos need to organize, to fight back and confront the power of these companies who are profiting from their labor.

Brian: Ligia Guallpa well-put executive director of the organizing group, the Worker's Justice Project, and Josefa Valasquez senior reporter for the news website called The City. I just want to give The City and extra shout out Josefa, for doing great work in general, but aso one of the things that you have coming up and I'll do it in your presence. I want to mention something else the news organization is doing.

The City has been reporting on the so many people we have lost here in the city since the beginning of the pandemic, including now a project where they're crowdsourcing the stories of New Yorkers lost during the pandemic. It's similar to some things we've been doing on the show, and we'll continue doing it in our way and coming weeks. Starting tomorrow, Friday, December 11th, and continuing through this weekend, The City is presenting a series of virtual events that they're calling the MISSING THEM Memorial Event.

The Zoom events include workshops on writing about your grief and celebrating life, a mental and spiritual health round table on grief and trauma with therapists, hospital chaplains, and other experts in that area. There will be poetry, discussions about how people are memorializing their loved ones in the pandemic, and much more.

We will tweet out a link to their page now where you can sign up, or you can go to their website, letsreimagine.org, that's letsreimagine.org. For a whole weekend of virtual events to help people process grief and trauma presented by The City new site. Josefa thank you for your reporting on the deliver, delivery workers and thanks to The City for all the good work you're doing over there, including this weekend of events.

Josefa: I appreciate the support, Brian.

Brian: Ligia, thank you so much. Thank you both for coming on.

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