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--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Welcome to In Conversation from Apple News Today. I'm Duarte Giraldino.
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--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Every weekend, we're taking you deeper into the best journalism on Apple News. When you order something online, whether it's a sandwich or a toothbrush or groceries, ever think about the people who get it all to your doorstep?
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--:-- Duarte Giraldino: We put things we want in our digital carts and then expect them to arrive as soon as possible. You know, I talk to workers who would bike four miles over multiple bridges to deliver a single slice of cake or bring a single coffee miles uptown.
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--:-- Duarte Giraldino: That's Josh Jessam. He's a reporter and recently came out with an article in The Verge and New York Magazine. It was about food delivery workers in New York City. just to talk to these people about the ways apps like DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub Seamless may be mistreating them.
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--:-- Duarte Giraldino: During one of his delivery shifts, New York Magazine caught up with Juan Solano and recorded an interview with him. He says it's more than just hard work and long hours. To hear him describe it, he faces risks and dangers on a daily basis.
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--:-- Duarte Giraldino: We bring electric bicycles because they've been able to run 80 streets for a cake. What he's saying is that it's common for delivery workers like him to be robbed of tips by restaurants, to have their electric bikes stolen.
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--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And they need those bikes because to make these deliveries, sometimes they have to travel 80 blocks just to drop off a single serving of ice cream. Delivery worker Rafael Islas told us about a time when someone tried to steal his bike while he was on the job.
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--:-- Rafael Islas: somebody pulled out a gun at me. And that was the day that I was like, I don't want to do this anymore, but I have to because I have family. I have to take care of them.
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--:-- Rafael Islas: So I just don't fight like that anymore because I feel scared.
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--:-- Duarte Giraldino: On top of all of that, they also have to deal with demanding customers who don't always tip them enough for their labor. Here's Jezza again.
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--:-- Jezza: When it comes to the workers, they're spending their days chasing just paltry tips all over town for just really inefficiently, small amounts of food.
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--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But this issue is bigger than just New York City. In 2017, there were as many as 55 million gig workers in the U.S., according to the International Labor Organization. That's about 34 percent of the American workforce.
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--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And mind you, the total number of people doing this type of work is expected to rise. This investigation is just one part of a bigger story about what's known as hidden labor.
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--:-- Duarte Giraldino: These are the people you rely on but rarely think about, and how they're poorly treated because we don't see them. Jess explains how, in New York City during the pandemic, delivery workers were hailed as heroes, but at the end of the day, that didn't matter much.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: It's an interesting characterization because it was a pretty big departure for how the city has viewed delivery workers in the past. That changed pretty quickly with the pandemic, and they got categorized along with all the other frontline workers.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: Obviously, the medical workers, also e-commerce, Amazon warehouse workers are often called heroes. And then you have the delivery workers, and they were really both from the city officials and the apps really embraced it, heralding these workers as heroes who let everyone else stay home.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: It was a characterization that the workers I spoke to, they appreciated at first, but when their working conditions didn't improve and in many ways got worse, it began to really grate.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: I think that it was the disjunct between being heralded as heroes and treated as expendable that helped galvanize them, among other issues.
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--:-- Duarte Giraldino: How critical were they for the functioning of our diminished economy during the height of the pandemic? Like, extremely essential, especially both to consumers and to the restaurant industry during that first lockdown period in March and April, especially when restaurants were restricted to takeout and delivery.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: And so these workers were really a lifeline to the restaurants and to anyone who wasn't able to get groceries. The delivery orders really increased and these workers became, they've always been a vital part of the city's infrastructure, but all the more so during the pandemic.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: In terms of the working conditions for people who are delivering our food, how would you describe it? Stressful, dangerous, and exposed.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: At the basic level when you working for these apps your pay is extremely unpredictable It often low You never really know whether you going to work tomorrow how much you going to make
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--:-- Josh Jessam: And you spend your day chasing orders around. And then you have the constant danger from accidents. You have apps that have quite aggressive time requirements and that require workers to go long distances.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: And workers have adapted by adopting electric bikes that go just under 30 miles an hour. And the consequence is that workers are whizzing around the city in great danger from traffic.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: You might get doored. You might skid out and crash. many workers have gotten in accidents. About half have injured themselves, according to a recent study.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: And then you have the other danger, which is thefts, that while you're unlocking a bike, someone might jump out at you with a knife or a broken bottle while you're crossing a bridge, take your bike, you might resist and get stabbed.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: So that's the physical danger. And then you just have the constant exposure. Like when you're not working for a restaurant, you don't have a shelter, just a place to store your bike and eat your lunch out of the elements.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: And then, you know, it surfaces perpetually and quite insultingly in the form of restrooms. You know, you're out all day going from restaurant to restaurant, but as far as the restaurant is concerned, you're not a customer or an employee and they don't have to let you use the restroom.
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--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You wrote about one worker who was stabbed. Can you tell us about him?
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--:-- Josh Jessam: Yeah, so there's a spot on the north side of Manhattan where there's a bridge that workers who live in the Bronx have to cross on their way home. And it's become a famously dangerous bridge.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: And some workers have set up sort of a civil guard, a crossing guard to help workers across. And one night this worker comes up to the bridge and he's bleeding from his hands.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: And what had happened was he was on his way home. He was approaching the bridge and had stopped at a red light, and someone jumped out with a knife, demanded his bike.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: He needs the bike to work, and so, like many workers, took a risk. He accelerated. He actually escaped, but got slashed on his way, and so showed up at the foot of the bridge where these other workers had gathered and was bleeding quite badly.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: It was a significant injury, and not terribly uncommon. You know, I heard of other workers who were stabbed, many workers who were beaten or tackled or grabbed while unlocking their bike by thieves.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: What's the calculus here? Why is he at this bridge and not going straight to a hospital?
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--:-- Josh Jessam: A lot of workers, when they get injured, they typically don't have health care. A lot of them are undocumented immigrants, they're contractors. And so they will resist getting taken to the hospital because they'll get hit with medical bills.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: I talked to a lot of workers who, you know, suffered concussions, various other scrapes and injuries, and they just take the time off work unpaid and try to heal themselves while avoiding the medical system.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: Eventually, this man was convinced to get in the ambulance and go to the hospital.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: So when you say workers, by the way, these aren't people who are directly employed by the apps.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: How would the apps describe the relationship with these delivery folks? The apps would call them independent contractors, and they say that the workers are always free to accept or reject the delivery, that they are sort of independent business people.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: In practice, the apps exert a large amount of algorithmic control over the workers in ways that can go beyond the conventional employment relationship.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: And it's interesting to talk about these apps' business model because no one in this situation is making money.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: They had billions in venture capital funding that they used to effectively subsidize this system. And so the workers are getting paid very little. Restaurants are often losing money or getting their margins eaten into by the fees the apps are charging.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: But customers are getting free delivery. And so it becomes tempting, easy, habitual to, you know, order a single bagel for basically no fee from who knows where.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: And so that really changed consumer behavior. None of the apps have figured out a way to be consistently profitable yet, but that's the current situation.
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--:-- Duarte Giraldino: I want to go back to one of these workers that you profiled, Anthony Chavez. You call him something of an influencer among delivery workers.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: Yeah so Anthony he just started he loves biking He biked a lot back home in Guatemala and that what he likes about delivery work
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--:-- Josh Jessam: And when he started doing delivery work a couple years ago he started filming himself on the job You know, he got a GoPro and just sort of filmed his day and posted it on Facebook to a fairly small audience at first.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: But then when he started posting about the thefts, lots of people started to follow him. it became sort of a, just a bulletin board to, you know, put out announcements, say, a bike was stolen here. Have you seen it? Watch out on this bridge. It's dangerous, things like that.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: And sort of inadvertently triggered this movement when he, along with some workers who all gathered together in one of these parking garages in Manhattan, and they decided to march to a nearby precinct and demand the police do something.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: And so he posted this video that lit the fuse that turned into this larger movement.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: There are these improvised and legal changes taking place. How are delivery workers fighting back on their own?
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--:-- Josh Jessam: So you really have two categories here. And one is the policy level. And this is what most of the Lourdes are doing. where they have been pushing the city council for more protections and a package of bills that they worked on passed recently.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: And it's really a big deal. It's one of the first attempts to regulate working conditions for delivery workers in a major U.S. city. And it lets them do things like set limits on the maximum distance they'll go for deliveries. is going to set minimum per delivery pay levels and require restaurants to provide bathroom access, among other things.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: So it's a big deal. It's also a first step. They'll still largely be independent contractors and not have basic protections an employee would have, like sick pay, minimum wage requirements, things like that.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: The other track is these improvised adaptations that workers have had to develop over the years to just be able to do their job. And so these are things like, with the emergence of the apps, they no longer have a restaurant to shelter in, you know, between lunch and dinner, no longer have a place to store their bike or charge their batteries.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: And so they've found parking garages and cut deals to rent out spare space where they can turn them into sort of a bike storage and break room.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: When their bike started getting stolen and they couldn't get the police to respond, they formed, you know, these quite sophisticated networks. They bought GPS devices and hid them on their bike. They keep photos of their bike handy so that when one gets stolen, they can send out a broadcast and say, here's my bike. It's stolen. If you see it, let me know.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: And they'll, someone, you know, often spots it quite quickly because there's so many delivery workers around.
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--:-- Duarte Giraldino: All the improvised solutions that you're talking about, the GPS, renting space in a garage, that has to eat away at their earnings because there's a cost to all this.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: So if you could put this into perspective, the cost of these improvised solutions versus how much they're actually earning. Can you do that math for me?
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--:-- Josh Jessam: Yeah, it really adds up. There was a study by the Workers' Justice Project in Cornell that calculated, when you factor all of that in, they have a base pay of about just under $8 an hour. You know, including tips, it's a bit over $12.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: Both of these are below minimum wage standards in New York and far below what the apps claim workers make.
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--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Your article paints a pretty bad picture of companies like DoorDash, Seamless, Uber Eats. How did they respond to demands from workers?
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--:-- Josh Jessam: Some of them have met with workers and made some gestures towards encouraging restaurants to let workers use their restroom and things like that.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: But workers are far from satisfied with what they've seen so far. You know, fundamentally, they want employee-like protections, and that's just not something these companies are prepared to grant.
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--:-- Duarte Giraldino: That particular reality, what does that represent about the way low-income workers are being treated, particularly in the gig economy?
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--:-- Josh Jessam: I talk to workers who think they're making a lot of money until they look at sort of the totals for their week and see that actually for the amount of time they spent in factoring in expenses, you know, they're barely breaking even.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: There a way in which it can make low wage work feel almost like gambling where workers they never know whether they going to work tomorrow or how much or whether they going to get a big tip with this delivery or where it going to send them
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--:-- Josh Jessam: And that can be almost addictive because you always have hope Addictive Yeah I think some workers will sort of always be you know hoping that they going to go out during a really busy time and make a lot of money
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--:-- Josh Jessam: It can lead them to take risks. Like the workers who went out during Hurricane Ida got a lot of publicity. Didn't work out for any of them.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: You know, I talked to a worker who ended up wrecking his bike going through waist-deep water, and that canceled out any earnings he made that night.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: I didn't really talk to anyone who had that payoff for them. But, you know, you get that alert that says high-demand time, and you're so desperate for money that you'll run out.
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--:-- Duarte Giraldino: We've been talking about delivery workers, and it's easy to think that they're not connected to us, that we don't have a hand in all this. albeit sometimes we do unwittingly play a role in this, what does their plight say about the rest of us?
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--:-- Josh Jessam: You know, we're creating this growing demand for delivery workers. I think the delivery apps, and there's a lot in common here with a lot of other apps and sort of any digital interface for consumers, they make it really easy to hide the labor behind what you consume.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: I think a lot of the customers that made these orders, they think they treat workers well. They think they're tipping well. Maybe they're tipping 20% as you would in a restaurant, but they're not thinking about the fact that 20% on a single bagel is not that much.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: And then they're not thinking about where it's coming from or how hard it was. And so you talk to workers and from their perspective, it's shocking. Why would someone order a bagel from 60 blocks away and tip me 60 cents?
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--:-- Josh Jessam: From the customer's side, though, I think it's just very easy not to think about what you're setting in motion when you click order. In the same way it is for many other companies when you click buy on Amazon. They've made it very easy to consume and hard to see the work that goes into that.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: Is a model even possible without someone losing out? I think there are real questions about whether delivery as it currently exists can exist.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: I think that some of these orders are so small that I don't see how it could ever make economic sense to send someone out to bring these small items long distances. someone's not paying the cost there. There's the cost of the work involved. And right now that's falling largely on the workers.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: I think if customers had to pay the real cost, they probably wouldn't order. And apps know that. And that's why they're subsidizing those orders and squeezing workers instead of showing customers the real cost there.
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--:-- Duarte Giraldino: I'm hearing you. And I know that there is this contrarian out there who would push back and say, Well, this is a job that they are freely doing. Why should we care about their struggle?
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--:-- Josh Jessam: First of all, I think if you're consuming any of these apps, you absolutely should care how the people are being treated.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: But I also think that having and sanctioning this type of labor and saying that it's okay for people to be quite minutely controlled in the way they work and get paid extremely low amounts of money and not have any benefits or protections, that sets the bar really low for how many companies can treat many kinds of workers.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: And if you're only operating out of self-interest, you should be concerned about that if you're a worker.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: I think that, you know, there are a lot of jobs that can be gigafied in this way. And if you allow it, then it becomes a pretty tempting way for companies to go where you can get the labor for much cheaper.
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--:-- Josh Jessam: And you're going to end up with even more workers who are sort of left out in the cold and the way these delivery workers have been.
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--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Josh Jessa is an investigations editor at The Verge. His article is called Revolt of the Delivery Workers. It's a collaboration between The Verge and New York Magazine. You can read it on Apple News with an Apple News Plus subscription.
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--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And you should know, Josh reached out to the delivery apps mentioned in this episode. Only DoorDash provided a statement on the record. In that statement, the company defended how much delivery workers get paid and said, they are constantly striving to improve working conditions.
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--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Thank you.
