Food delivery apps are booming. Your workers often struggle.

When the pandemic shutdown led to the Manhattan restaurant where Natanael Evangelista was an employee shut down for good, he quickly went to work for food delivery applications. I had few options. He was undocumented, didn't speak much English, and needed a lot of money. He owed months of rent and his family in Mexico needed help.

But he was worried. Two of his cousins were also delivery men: one had contracted the coronavirus and fell into a coma, while the other had been attacked and had his bicycle stolen.

With hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers out of work and the city's unemployment rate at 13.2 percent, many desperate people have turned to working for food delivery apps like DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub, which have seen high demand from customers. who work from home. .

While delivery drivers have been essential in feeding New Yorkers and keeping them safe, their working conditions, which were already precarious before the pandemic, have worsened.

The recent increase in cases means an increased risk of exposure when traveling from restaurants to homes. The rise in crime in New York City has also led to assault and battery cases. bike theft.

"Delivery work is a dangerous business," said Evangelista, 27. "It is very worrying".

Some workers also complain that many restaurants deny them the use of the bathroom for health reasons, forcing them to carry plastic bottles.

Even as food delivery companies have seen an increase in sales, workers' wages have remained erratic. Because drivers are self-employed, they are not entitled to minimum wage, overtime, or any other benefits, such as health insurance. Undocumented immigrants, who are not eligible for unemployment or federal coronavirus assistance, make up the majority of the workforce in New York.

Aggregate competition from an increase in new workers has compounded financial challenges. While there are no precise figures, advocacy groups estimate that there were roughly 50,000 delivery workers before the pandemic, a number they say has grown exponentially. Uber alone said it had added 36,000 couriers in New York since March.

DoorDash and Uber said they had provided additional help to delivery drivers during the pandemic, including offering sick pay to those who contracted the virus. DoorDash, the nation's largest food delivery app, said it provided masks, gloves, hand sanitizer and wipes to drivers, as well as access to low-cost telemedicine appointments.

"Since the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis, we have taken steps to protect and support Dashers on the front lines," said Becky Sosnov, a DoorDash spokeswoman.

DoorDash said it had changed its payment model, which was criticized last year after was revealed that tips were used to subsidize their payments to workers. The company recently reached an agreement of $ 2.5 million with prosecutors in Washington, DC, after being accused of misleading consumers about how he tipped his workers.

At Uber Eats, "riders receive 100 percent of all tips," said Meghan Casserly, a spokeswoman for the company. He said Uber Eats has provided 10 million safety supplies - masks, wipes and hand sanitizer - to workers in the United States and Canada.

But workers interviewed for this article who drive for other food delivery apps said they sometimes still don't get all of their tips.

Some food delivery apps say drivers can earn up to $ 22 per hour including tips, although many drivers said they never earned anything like it.

In a park on Manhattan's Lower East Side, Edgar Usac, a delivery driver, was waiting for orders on a recent Saturday. After four hours, he said, he had won $ 11. Another driver, Elías Pacheco, 35, said: “I have won $ 32 so far. I started at 10:30 this morning. " It was 5 pm

Food delivery app drivers are typically paid per delivery based on the estimated duration and distance of a trip, plus tips. The job may be convenient for people who supplement a primary source of income, but a struggle for those who rely on it as their primary job, worker advocates said.

"The pandemic really exacerbated the challenges these workers face and that they face on a regular basis," said Maria Figueroa, director of labor and policy research for the Cornell University Worker Institute. "In addition to receiving a low salary, they don't get enough work from each of the applications, so they have to work for at least three or four of them, and there are more workers than the market can contain."

Treating drivers as essentially self-employed, Figueroa said, has allowed food delivery apps to make up for slim profit margins by not having to pay for health insurance, retirement benefits or workers' compensation for on-the-job injuries.

On good days, Evangelista earns about $ 100 after working five to six hours, but on other days she can earn as little as $ 42. In her old job, working in a restaurant kitchen in Midtown Manhattan, she was earning about $ 15 the hour, he said.

Workers said that food delivery apps don't always give them all of their tips or sometimes deduct them from their pay.

Gustavo Ajche, 37, a construction worker who turned to food delivery apps when he lost his job during the New York shutdown in the spring, said an app, Relay, blocked him after complaining that it did not he had received his tips. "They don't care," he said.

In one case, a $ 10 tip that he had received from a customer appeared on the restaurant's receipt, which he showed to a journalist, but not on his Relay app or on his bank account.

Alex Blum, CEO of Relay, a small company that delivers primarily to New York City, attributed the error to the restaurant not manually entering the tip into the Relay system.

Blum said Relay paid its delivery men $ 11.80 an hour, the city's minimum wage, even between deliveries. But the company has been the subject of numerous litigation of workers who say they are not paid fairly for the hours they work.

"They don't think about you, about your life, about your bike," said Otoniel Timoteo, 36, who began working from home in May after being fired from a restaurant in Queens where he worked as a waiter. “We cannot make demands, otherwise they will block you. But we have no choice. How can we live?

The New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission two years ago adopted a minimum wage of $ 17.22 per hour for drivers of ride-sharing apps like Uber and Lyft, but it doesn't apply to delivery workers. Efforts in New York State to give concert workers more rights by reclassifying them as employees have stalled in the Legislature.

In California, companies that employ workers in concert won a major victory on Election Day when voters approved a referendum that allowed companies to continue treating workers as independent contractors.

Across the country, the demand for takeout food during the pandemic has been a boon for food delivery applications.

"The pandemic has certainly been a good tailwind for revenue growth, and it has also helped them begin to close the gap to profitability more quickly," said Tom White, Senior Internet Analyst at DA Davidson. , a wealth management firm.

Uber's delivery service generated $ 1.45 billion in sales nationwide between July and September compared to $ 645 million during the same period last year.

DoorDash, which also owns another food delivery app, Caviar, reported revenue of $ 1.92 billion in the nine months through September, compared to $ 587 million for the same period last year, according to a prospectus released earlier. this year for its planned initial public offering. It registered 543 million orders through September, compared with 181 million in the same period last year.

Even before Evangelista took his first order for a food app, the requirements for the job put him in even more debt.

His electric bike cost him $ 2,000. Two locks for the bike cost around $ 200. He had to buy a helmet. He even paid out of his own pocket for a $ 65 tote bag from Postmates, another grocery delivery app, to carry orders, he said.

His younger brother Enoch, also laid off from a restaurant job, recently signed up to be a delivery man. Evangelista could not suggest an alternative.

"The pay is not good, but there are no good jobs anyway," he said. "We need to work and survive in the best possible way."