On a cold, snowy night in 2009, Gustavo Ajche walked miles through the frozen streets of Manhattan, with a food delivery in hand. That night, Ajche, an immigrant delivery worker, experienced harsh conditions he and countless others were enduring in the city. 

Fast forward to 2020, when Ajche founded Los Deliveristas Unidos (LDU), one of the largest app-based worker collectives in the country. His experience in that snowstorm was just one example of the daily challenges delivery workers in New York City often face. According to Ajche, delivery workers go largely unrecognized for their essential labor. LDU, along with the Workers Justice Project (WJP) began bringing communities together to advocate for fair pay, and worker protections and to bring these workers’ issues into the spotlight. 

Worker centers, like WJP, are community-based organizations for workers who are not a part of a union. Since app-based delivery workers in NYC are classified as independent contractors, deliveristas lack the bargaining rights that would allow them to unionize and negotiate for fair treatment. WJP specifically advocates for low-wage immigrant workers, particularly those in construction, domestic work, and app-based delivery jobs in NYC. 

On Tuesday, Sept. 24 at CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies (SLU) Sarah Watson, Director of SLU, moderated a discussion with Ajche and Ligia Guallpa, Executive Director of WJP, about their efforts to transform the future for NYC’s 62,000 app-based delivery workers. 

“I still remember the first march that we organized to make these demands, we organized it in less than a week and saw more than 800 deliveristas show up at our first rally,” Ajche said in Spanish to the audience, his words translated by Guallpa. 

Guallpa has been a key figure in organizing deliveristas and fighting for their rights. Under her leadership, she says, WJP has become one of the most effective worker centers in the country, with the goal of empowering workers and setting a national precedent for gig workers’ rights. She also made sure to credit “the real heroes. The real people that make this movement happen are actually the deliveristas.”

“Understanding what it really means to be a gig worker as an immigrant, undocumented, working in the industry that already lacks protections, that’s where my organization journey started,” Guallpa shared to the audience. 

She explained that many delivery workers couldn’t understand when or how they were getting paid. The delivery workers WJP and LDU advocate for are often employed by big tech companies like Doordash, Uber Eats, Grubhub, and Postmates. Guallpa said at the event that these major companies withhold vital information that often leave workers powerless. Often they were paid as little as $5-7 an hour. 

Guallpa recalled how the pandemic exposed the vulnerability of delivery workers. “It was the deliveristas who were out there risking their lives, making sure everybody gets their groceries, their food when everybody had to stay in,” she said. 

But with the formation of LDU, delivery workers finally had a collective voice. 

LDU’s most significant success came this year on April 1st, when they secured a landmark policy announced by Mayor Eric Adams’ administration mandating a minimum wage of $19.56 an hour, excluding tips, for delivery workers in NYC. But the fight for delivery workers protections isn’t over. Guallpa has continued to work with the U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Mayor Eric Adams, and other elected officials to launch “Deliveristas Hubs,” which would establish charging stations and rest hubs across the city to meet the needs of delivery workers. 

“We have 77% of those 62,000 (deliveristas) riding on e-bikes, and the biggest issues that the deliveristas are experiencing is that while they’re trying to deliver food they don’t have places to park the bike, and no place to charge their e-batteries,” Guallpa said. 

As the conversation came to a close, Guallpa and Ajche reminded the audience that despite the challenges workers’ still face, their movement is gaining momentum. Multiple city council members are on record showing their support for LDU, including NYC Comptroller Brad Lander, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, and council members Majorie Velezquez (CD13), Carlina Rivera (CD2), and Justin Brannan (CD43).

Home care workers in New York, like so many essential workers, have been a driving force throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. However, due to low wages thousands of workers have left this field for other jobs offering better pay.

In 2020, 76% of home care agencies were forced to delay or reject families who wanted to hire a home health care aide because of the worker shortage. Because of that both older and disabled New Yorkers did not get the care that they needed. As a matter of fact, 17% of home care positions are left unfilled due to staff shortages.

In Dec., Governor New York Kathy Hochul stated that health care workers should be paid more.

“This is going to be one of our highest priorities in my State of the State,” she said. She acknowledged that because of the low wages, many home health care aides have decided to look elsewhere for employment or even gave up on the health care field.

In NY 90% of home care workers are women and 60% immigrants. There are about 60,000 home care workers that are represented by 1199SEIU, the health care union.

“Unfortunately, this is a job that’s just been historically undervalued and underpaid,” said Madeline Sterling, MD, MPH. She is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and is a health services researcher. “And I think that it really needs to change.”

According to LaborPress.org, the average salary of a home care worker in New York City is $15 an hour. “So despite providing day to day care to patients and providing critically essential care many are really struggling to make ends meet earning really low wages,” said Dr. Sterling.

Yoselyn Fernandez is a home care worker at the New York Foundation and has been in this field for 20 years. “Honestly, I don’t think it is sufficient [wages] because we get asked to do basically what a nurse does,” she said in Spanish as her daughter Gloria translated for her.

“We cook, clean, and bathe them,” said Gladys Medina in Spanish as her daughter Ximena translated for her. She too is a home care worker and has been employed at Signature Care for 12 years. ”We even assist them to use the bathroom and that sometimes requires us to help them out of their wheelchairs or change their diapers.”

They are also responsible for giving them medicine and bringing them to appointments.

On Mar. 16, the Fair Pay for Home Care Act was introduced at the state level in New York. The mandate would raise home care wages to 150% of the minimum wage. That would make home health care agents wages between $19.80 and $22.50 an hour.

Rachel May, a Democratic Senator from Syracuse and chair of the Committee on Aging, is sponsoring the S5374A bill. “With New York State’s population growing older and demanding the choice of long-term care at home, I am hopeful to get a substantial investment in our home care workforce this budget” she said. “By including Fair Pay for Home care in the budget, we can provide a dignified, living wage to thousands of workers while keeping seniors in their homes home, where they want to be.”

As the deadline is approaching, more than 100 home care workers rallied at the 1199SEIU headquarters in Manhattan with Rev. Al Sharpton and Public Advocate Juamaane Williams on Tues., Mar. 22. They wanted to send a message to Gov. Hochul and that is to include a permanent raise for home care workers in the state budget.

“As the state budget deadline approaches, Albany must include Fair Pay for Home Care so that workers can receive fair wages, providers can ensure the best possible care, and more future home care workers join the industry,” said Williams as per the press release from 1199SEIU. “The pandemic has shown how critical it is to be able to receive high-quality care in our homes and laid bare the state’s failure to support the people doing that work-as we recover from the pandemic, we can’t allow this crisis to continue.”

At the rally, Rev. Sharpton said even in the depths of the pandemic when even Times Square was deserted, “the only people who showed up in the Twilight Zone were home-care workers. You can’t Zoom home care. You can’t do home care remote.”

Many of these home care workers have risked their families and their own health in order to take care of their clients.

“When you do this kind of job, you have to be loving and compassionate,” Delisa Sewell-Henry, an 1199 home-care delegate, told the crowd. “It’s not an easy job.” During the worst of the pandemic, she added, home-care workers took care of people when “their own children wouldn’t come visit them.”

Now it is time to take care of them. The bill passed both the Assembly and the Senate and is on the way to Gov. Hochul’s desk.

One in every five New Yorkers will be 60 or older by 2040. Yet the nation is struggling with elder care.

There are 49 million working family caregivers in this country who care for an aging loved one or a family member with a disability, according to Ai-Jen Poo, executive director at National Domestic Workers Alliance who spoke at a virtual City University of New York conference on Thursday. Many of these people are trying to manage work at the same time, and there’s nothing in place in our country to support them.

It starts with home care workers, mostly women, who do not make a living wage. The average salary in Brooklyn is $14.84 an hour according to Indeed.com. In some other states it’s as low as $8 an hour.

“Imagine trying to support yourself and pay the bills, let alone raise a family on $18,200 a year in a place like New York,” said Poo.

Many home care workers eventually leave that position to earn more money elsewhere and even those that work at nursing homes quit, leaving the homes understaffed and overworked. This does not create the best atmosphere for both the elderly and employees.

J. Phillip Thompson, Professor of Political Science and Urban Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology told those at the conference, “All of these of these elders who have given us their lives are living in the most undignified conditions, supported by a workforce that is given absolutely untenable responsibility to care for dozens of people every hour. It’s literally impossible.”

There is also the issue in New York where private equity firms are buying nursing homes because they want the real estate, so they can sell off the property and build luxury condos.

In 2012, the state wanted to closedown Interfaith Medical Center in the heart of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn because it was losing money. They were losing money because the Medicaid reimbursement rates are low.

The state was going to shut it down and a community labor coalition got together weekly for years. They asked Thompson for help to advise them on how not to get the hospital shutdown. They were able to save 1,000 jobs and able to keep the hospital open in a community where there are a lot of sick people.

“It would have been far worse,” Thompson said, if the hospital had been shut down prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

There has been progress made lately as President Joe Biden spoke about caregiving as being one his core pillars. In Washington State the Service Employees International Union built a strong workers union there. The University of Washington has trained 40,000 home care workers a year and in 12 different languages. The hourly rage has also increased to $17 an hour.

“It’s a starting salary, and they’ve come a long way and it gives you a sense of this is possible. We can do this,” Poo continued “We actually need each other and you can see it in our own homes, the way we rely on each other across class, across race, across community when it comes to care.”