For years,
delivery workers in New York have improvised solutions like the bridge
patrol to make their jobs feasible. These methods have been remarkably
successful, undergirding the illusion of limitless and frictionless
delivery. But every hack that made their working conditions tolerable
only encouraged the apps and restaurants to ask more of them, until the
job evolved into something uniquely intense, dangerous, and precarious.
Take the electric bike. When e-bikes first arrived in the
city in the late 2000s, they were ridden mostly by older Chinese
immigrants who used them to stay in the job as they aged, according to
Do Lee, a Queens College professor who wrote his dissertation on
delivery workers. But once restaurant owners and executives at companies
like Uber, DoorDash, and Grubhub-Seamless figured out it was possible
to do more and faster deliveries, they adjusted their expectations, and
e-bikes became a de facto job requirement.
Today, delivery workers have an overwhelmingly preferred
brand: the Arrow, essentially a rugged battery-powered mountain bike
that tops out at around 28 miles per hour. A new Arrow runs $1,800 and
can easily exceed $2,500 once it’s equipped with phone-charging mounts,
lights, second batteries, air horns, racks, mud flaps, and other
essential upgrades. What began as a technological assist has become a
major start-up investment.
Delivery workers now move faster than just about anything else in the
city. They keep pace with cars and weave between them when traffic
slows, ever vigilant for opening taxi doors and merging trucks. They
know they go too fast, any worker will say, but it’s a calculated risk.
Slowing down means being punished by the apps.
[…]
The main reason restaurants weren’t already letting you order a single
bacon, egg, and cheese from 50 blocks away for almost no charge is that
it’s a terrible business model. Expensive, wasteful, labor intensive —
you would lose money on every order. The apps promised to solve this
problem through algorithmic optimization and scale. This has yet to
happen — none of the companies are consistently profitable — but for a
while they solved the problem with money. Armed with billions in venture
capital, the apps subsidized what had been a low-margin side gig of the
restaurant industry until it resembled any other Silicon Valley
consumer-gratification machine. Seamless, which merged with Grubhub and
added its own gig platform to compete, was particularly direct in its
pitch, running cutesy subway ads about ordering delivery with zero human
contact and requesting miniature entrées for your hamster.
The apps failed and bought each other, and now three
giants remain: DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub-Seamless. Each divides
the New York market more or less equally, and each uses the piecework
model pioneered by Uber itself. Workers get paid when they accept and
complete a delivery, and a gamelike system of rewards and penalties
keeps them moving: high scores for being on time, low scores and fewer
orders for tardiness, and so on. Chavez and others call it the patrón fantasma,
the phantom boss — always watching and quick to punish you for being
late but nowhere to be found when you need $10 to fix your bike or when
you get doored and have to go to the hospital.
[…]
If these sound more like the demands placed on an actual employee as
opposed to an ostensibly free independent contractor, many class-action
plaintiffs have agreed. [Relay] has been sued multiple times for
worker misclassification, tip theft, and other infractions. It settled
three times, avoiding a ruling that could torpedo its business model,
and another case is currently in arbitration.
[…]
Bikes, cold-weather gear, garages, maintenance: The costs add up.
Workers even pay for their own app-branded cooler bags. So while
DoorDash claims Manhattan workers make $33 per hour, including tips,
when you factor in expenses, delivery workers have a base pay of $7.87
per hour, according to a recent study of app-based workers conducted by
the Cornell Worker Institute and the Worker’s Justice Project. Neither
estimate includes time spent waiting between deliveries.
[…]
After the success of the October march, the Deliveristas planned an even
larger rally for April. This time, thousands gathered and rode honking
to City Hall, where they were joined by representatives from SEIU 32BJ,
the powerful union that backed the Fight for $15. City Councilmember
Brad Lander, then running for city comptroller, and State Senator
Jessica Ramos spoke. Later, the City Council introduced a package of
bills crafted in discussion with the Deliveristas that would establish
minimum pay and give workers more control over their routes, among other
changes (it will likely be voted on this month). In June, the
Deliveristas helped kill a bill pushed by Uber and Lyft that would have
allowed gig workers to unionize while falling short of offering them
full employment rights.
Some of the apps also began discussions with the
Deliveristas. DoorDash announced that nearly 200 (out of 18,000) of its
restaurants would let delivery workers use their restrooms and that the
company is working on an emergency-assistance button for its app.
Ajche is far from appeased. He recalled a Zoom meeting in
which DoorDash put forward a “top Dasher” to tell them how great
working for DoorDash was. Ajche silenced him by saying that he can bring
500 people with complaints. “They are afraid of us,” he said. “They
think we are trying to unionize.”
Located in the Air Massif of Niger are two of the largest animal rock petroglyphs in the world. Known as the Dabous Giraffes they have been dated to about 8,000BCE. While the artist will forever remain unknown, this area of Niger has over 900 similar carvings of animals and humans. The period of these glyphs (12,000-7,000BCE) was known as the Neolithic Subpluvial, a time when the Sahara was a much wetter savannah that stretched thousands of miles and could sustain animal and human life. The giraffes are carved into a sandstone outcrop and depict a large male and smaller female. Shifting desert sands possibly covered the glyphs for millennia before they were discovered in 1987.
