Martha Daniela Guerrero
In the spring of 2020, Gustavo Ajche would bike around the closed-down atrium at 60 Wall Street, hoping Manhattan’s longstanding resting spot for delivery workers would open its doors. By the time winter came at the height of the pandemic, Covid-19 had pushed thousands of delivery app drivers like Ajche out to the city streets, making them go into buildings, hospitals, and homes to bring food and groceries to isolated New Yorkers.
Despite their designation as essential, around 65,000 delivery app workers, most of them migrants from Guatemala, Mexico, South Asia, China, and West Africa, faced poor and dangerous working conditions – including no PPE, earnings below minimum wage, rising driving distances across the city, lacking transparency over tips, no access to restaurant restrooms, and of course, no public spaces to shelter or rest amidst 14-hour shifts.
In late 2020, Ajche, a Guatemalan Kʼicheʼ native who came to New York nearly two decades ago, was walking down 86th St with Ligia Guallpa, the Executive Director of Workers Justice Project (WJP), a migrant workers’ center that has supported app drivers in their long fight for better pay, safety, and control over their labor. Passing an abandoned newsstand, Ajche recalls telling Guallpa that these kinds of unused spaces could be repurposed as shelter and rest stations for delivery workers.
As leader and co-founder of Deliveristas Unidos, a grassroots collective led by indigenous Guatemalan and Mexican delivery workers that emerged in the summer of 2020, Ajche would fill in Guallpa on drivers’ concerns, including the need to rest, take shelter, and charge their electric bikes amidst long hours biking and physically exhausting shifts.
“Those of us working on the streets every day, with no office and no chance to recharge, we’re human beings too, we have basic needs too,” said Ajche. “We’re not talking about luxury, we’re talking about the chance to sit down for five minutes after a long shift, have lunch when you’ve been biking for four hours straight, talk to other drivers when you haven’t talked to anyone all day. We’re talking about having somewhere safe, somewhere decent to just take a beat.”
From Ajche’s first imaginings at the onset of the pandemic, delivery worker centers became one of Deliveristas Unidos’ core demands to city officials and companies alike. After two years of organizing, migrant drivers achieved a historic victory when they secured a slate of landmark City Council protections last September, including minimum pay standards, greater transparency from delivery apps, and the right to use restaurant restrooms.
Protections won by delivery workers last year didn’t include shelters, but the idea lived on in Ajche and others, evolving into workers’ hubs with charging stations for bikes and phones, as well as a space to eat and rest.
“Sometimes you think of things, you hope for things, you fight for things, and they incredibly come true,” said Ajche, who lobbied for hubs but questioned their feasibility in a city with multiple regulations and a Parks Department that had to approve space repurposing. “I am very proud that this project is finally happening, it’s been a long road and none of this would be happening without the continued pressure of drivers saying, ‘hey, we need this, we deserve this.’”
As Deliveristas Unidos drew high-profile allies Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-The Bronx/Queens) and Senator Chuck Schumer (D-New York) in early 2022, Mayor Eric Adams recently announced that New York City will receive a $1 million federal grant to start turning vacant newsstands into hubs for delivery workers.
“It’s a game changer,” said Schumer, who initially announced his commitment to help fund the idea during a ride-along meeting with Deliveristas Unidos last fall, describing the initiative as “the first infrastructure of its kind for app-based delivery workers in the whole nation.”
“Deliveristas are out there doing the hard work, day in and day out, and are essential to New Yorkers’ way of life and to our city’s economy, and essential workers deserve essential services,” said Adams. “While most people have a break room to rest while at work, app-based food delivery workers do not.”
The first announced hub will repurpose a large newsstand in front of City Hall, but the collaboration between Schumer and Adams is still several months away. Additionally, restrooms are currently missing from these spaces because of their limited size. Even though one of the new bills passed in 2021 fines restaurants that restrict restroom access to delivery workers, drivers continue to report violations.
“It’s very hard to enforce, especially because so many of the workers are immigrants without documents and it can be scary to report your employer in those conditions,” said Ajche, referencing not only a continued lack of access to restaurant restrooms, but apps’ flaunting of distance limits, tip and wage regulations, and other key laws passed last year to protect workers. “A solution might be for us to start collecting data on app and restaurant abuses because these things just keep happening but don’t always get reported.”
Neither Adams nor Parks and Recreation Department Commissioner Sue Donoghue specified how many hubs could eventually be created. Some of the funds announced by Schumer this week will also be used to renovate the headquarters of Worker’s Justice Project in Williamsburg.
As workers await details of the hubs, as well as a clearer timeline, the City Hall newsstand is expected to provide shelter for workers to get out of the rain, snow, and extreme heat, as well as recharge their electric bikes and phones.
Parking-space hubs are also a possibility, even though no agreements for those spaces have been reached yet. Fantástica Brooklyn designer J. Manuel Mansylla, who is working pro bono for Deliveristas Unidos, shared potential outlines for these hubs, featuring wooden countertops, small benches atop jersey barriers, and metal bike racks.
As delivery apps continue to hire gig workers to service one of their largest markets in the U.S., Ajche pointed to the paramount need for infrastructure. “For many people, the pandemic meant staying at home, but for us, it became a time of constant, grueling work and no chance to ever decompress and rest. It’s been exhausting, and these hubs are a token of respect for the kind of work we’ve been doing. I’m really excited for them to finally be real.”
