It’s Friday. We’ll look at steps New York City is taking to improve conditions for low-wage food deliverers, who became lifelines during the pandemic. We’ll also fly into the New York Public Library for a glimpse of holdings you can’t borrow.
They were already everywhere, fixtures of the cityscape and the new economy on their electric bikes.
But when the pandemic closed in and restaurants closed down, delivery workers became essential for many New Yorkers, bringing meals to locked-down customers day and night. Chicken tikka masala? Eggs over easy? Dispatched by unseen apps, not a gruff voice on a staticky two-way radio, the deliverers rushed off on their rounds. They navigated hazardous streets, endured horrible weather and risked being robbed and assaulted.
And they took home meager pay.
On Thursday, the city moved to improve their working conditions. The City Council approved first-in-the-nation minimum pay standards for deliverers who work for app-based services like DoorDash, Grubhub and Uber Eats. As my colleague Jeffrey Mays noted, other cities have taken steps to regulate food delivery apps, but no city has gone as far as New York.
It’s been two years since my colleague Andy Newman spent six days as a traffic-defying, tip-seeking food deliverer, crisscrossing the city on a bicycle. He wrote then that the job was “often like a game of real-life speed chess played across the treacherous grid of the city,” with riders working for several apps simultaneously.
As the City Council prepared to approve the legislation on Thursday, he scanned recent stories and said it was “pretty clear that the franticness, the invisibleness and the desperation that characterized the job have not changed.” He added that videos of deliverers slogging through waist-high water after Hurricane Ida had left little doubt about the pressures those workers face.
Subminimum pay, lousy tips
The job still pays subminimum wages with lousy tips. That was underscored in a recent report issued by the Workers’ Justice Project, an advocacy group, and Cornell University’s Worker Institute. It put the net pay of app-based delivery workers, including tips, at $12.21 an hour. Without tips — which the report called “a highly unstable form of income” — their pay dropped to $7.87 an hour.
Andy learned the hard way not to count on tips. He delivered an egg sandwich — and sang “Happy Birthday” — to a woman on the Upper East Side. The tip he received? Zero.
That was before the pandemic. New Yorkers proved to be big tippers once the coronavirus hit and in-person dining became a memory. But customers became less generous as restaurants reopened, according to an analysis by our Times colleagues Kevin Quealy and Amanda Rosa in June. And the Workers’ Justice-Cornell study said that underpayment or nonpayment of base pay and tips worsened during the pandemic.
José Ramirez — who has worked as a delivery worker in Manhattan for four years and is a member of Los Deliveristas Unidos, a group that has fought for protections for delivery workers, as the news site The City has reported — said he had been earning about $8 an hour before tips. He said he has to work more than 10 hours a day most days to make enough to support himself.
“People sometimes come up to me after I make their delivery and tell me they’re sorry they can’t tip me,” Mr. Ramirez said. “I feel happy I helped, but I’m not getting paid.” He said he had to cover the costs of the tools of the trade — his bicycle, his backpack and his cellphone.
Andy said it was clear that the job was still dangerous — nine delivery workers have died on the job this year, as of last week. It’s injury-prone work, a constant concern since the jobs do not provide health insurance. Just under half of the deliverers in the survey said they had been in an accident on a delivery run. Slightly more — 54 percent — said their bikes had been stolen. About 30 percent reported being assaulted.
Mayor Bill de Blasio, who supported the bills, said that he himself did not use food delivery apps. “Cut out the intermediary and just support the local restaurant directly,” he said.
Weather
Prepare for thunderstorms and showers, which should clear up later on. Temps are in the low 70s then dropping to the high 50s at night, so expect a chilly evening. Take care, New York.
alternate-side parking
In effect until Tuesday (Shemini Atzereth).
The latest New York news
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Dr. Howard A. Zucker, the New York State health commissioner, resigned following political pressure for his removal over his role in the state’s pandemic response under former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.
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Thousand-member Facebook groups were dissecting PDF transcriptions of each witness’s testimony in R. Kelly’s trial. Here’s a look at why Mr. Kelly’s trial is captivating a Black audience online.
An overview of library treasures that aren’t books
This is about something new, something old and a place where many things are borrowed. No wedding is involved.
The something new is a drone with a video camera that made the video above. It flew into the New York Public Library, where there are millions of things that can be borrowed, but not the ones the drone circled in a new gallery that opens on Friday. You can’t check out Thomas Jefferson’s handwritten draft copy of the Declaration of Independence and take it home to read. (It has a paragraph condemning slavery that was deleted from the final version, adopted on July 4, 1776.)
The drone’s-eye view, created by the production company Sky Tech One, took in dozens of other objects on display, among them Charles Dickens’s writing desk. The drone floated by the only surviving copy of a letter from Christopher Columbus to King Ferdinand’s court announcing his “discovery” of the Americas. It also passed over the first-edition sheet music of “The Star Spangled Banner,” typo and all. Francis Scott Key’s lyrics may have suited the United States to a T, but the sheet music described it as “A Pariotic Song.”
The library calls the display the Polonsky Exhibition of the New York Public Library’s Treasures. It was underwritten by the financier Leonard Polonsky, who has lived in London for years but grew up in Brooklyn and went to New York University. I got a preview for a story in 2019, before the new gallery was built.
I wrote in 2019 that the objects in the exhibition have always been available to scholars and researchers, but that the library wanted to make everyday visitors aware that it has more than books.
That reflected the library’s broader mission, amassing and preserving knowledge “so anyone — now or generations from now — can explore it, learn from it, understand it in new contexts and use it to grow and create a better, brighter next chapter,” Anthony W. Marx, the library’s president, said.
What we’re reading
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The Fugees announced their reunion. Then they did a pop-up performance at Pier 17, Gothamist reports.
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In its 138 years, The Met has put on some 300 titles. Not one has been by a Black composer. Until now.
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A new public art installation is coming to the Port Authority Bus Terminal. You might be a part of it.
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What we’re watching: Jesse Green, the Times’s chief theater critic, will discuss Broadway’s return, what he’s excited about this theater season and the Tony Awards on “The New York Times Close Up With Sam Roberts.” The show airs on Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 1:30 p.m. and Sunday at 12:30 p.m. [CUNY TV]
MetROPOLITAN diary
Something about life
Dear Diary:
On one of the winter’s last snowy evenings, I was walking through the Village, heading for an uptown train with my umbrella, scarf and galoshes and intent on avoiding the icy spots on the pavement.
A young man, probably in his mid-20s, in a black pea coat and hoodie, approached me. I was prepared for him to ask me directions to the New School or the PATH train.
He stopped directly in front of me with a guileless look on his face.
“Tell me something about life,” he said.
Interesting assignment.
“It’s important to be present,” I said. “Stay in each moment as long as you can.”
He was still looking at me.
“And put worry away; it’s generally useless.”
He continued to stand there.
“That OK?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, and then he walked off through the snow.
— Robert Moulthrop
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you on Monday. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Melissa Guerrero, Meghan Louttit, Rick Martinez and Olivia Parker contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.
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