The Plight of the Delivery Worker

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News, Society & Culture, Business

3.9 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 16 September 2021

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the last few years and particularly during the pandemic, New York City’s delivery workers have become a key part of the food industry’s infrastructure, allowing restaurants to do business with customers too stressed to leave their desks or too afraid of catching a dangerous virus to show up themselves. But a growing incidence of violent attacks and bike thefts has laid bare just how vulnerable the people who bring you your takeout are. Why is it that such essential workers have been exploited by the apps that rely on them, abandoned by the police and the city, and forced to band together just to get by?

Guest: Josh Dzieza, an investigations editor and feature writer at The Verge covering technology, business, and climate change.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	When Hurricane Ida made landfall in New York, there was this one image I just couldn't get out of my head.
0:11.8	It was video of a delivery guy. He is trudging slowly through waist-high water, plastic takeout bag slung over his handlebars.
0:24.3	Some people saw this guy as stoic, out there doing his job, no matter what. Other people saw him as tragic. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio
0:32.1	Cortez tweeted out, please do not be the person who orders delivery during a flash flood.
0:38.9	If it's too dangerous for you, it's too dangerous for them.
0:44.1	But the delivery workers themselves, they kind of shrugged their shoulders.
0:50.4	Yeah, I mean, they were not surprised.
0:52.2	Most of them worked during Ida for a bit.
0:54.8	Josh Jezza spent the summer shadowing New York's deliverymen.
0:58.8	He was just about to publish a big piece about them when the storm hit.
1:02.2	His article was accompanied by its own Ida image, a delivery guy ringing a doorbell on a handsome stoop, rain pouring down, he is there to deliver a single ice cream.
1:16.2	People called it the worst night ever, just in terms of damage to bikes, the difficulty, the danger,
1:22.9	and the lack of financial reward. But I don't think anyone was surprised that people were out.
1:31.1	I wonder if you were ever able to get out on a bike with these workers, or whether that was just
1:35.9	too hard because they go so fast and they're so busy all the time. Yeah, I initially wanted to,
1:42.0	but I didn't end up doing it. They go extremely fast. A lot of them, you know, when I would ask, just say, you'll just slow me down.
1:51.8	Leave this to the big boys. Yeah.
1:56.4	New York's delivery workers didn't always move so fast, and they weren't always so vulnerable
2:02.0	to the elements. But apps like Seamless and Grubhub have supercharged this gig.
2:08.8	An electric bike, they can go 30 miles an hour, is a prerequisite of the job at this point.
2:14.7	That's so you can deliver just about anywhere. And it turns out when your
2:19.1	boss is an app, an event like a once in a hundred years flash flood, it ups the stakes.
	...

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