Seraphin Bouda, 26, is pictured here cycling to a Manhattan customer to deliver a food order. Nowadays, it’s common to have food delivered to offices or homes. Restaurants outsource the delivery to apps, which then outsource it to freelancers on bicycles.
Food-delivery workers such as Bouda are “the most vulnerable workers in digital labor,” Maria Figueroa, director of labor and policy research for the Cornell University Worker Institute, told The New York Times.
New York City is one of the first cities to offer a minimum wage to Uber and Lyft drivers, but this does not apply to food-delivery workers — even if they use the same apps as the drivers do to get work. Some of the apps they use even take out tips from the workers’ pay.
And their work is dangerous. The City University of New York found that, in 2018, nearly a third of delivery workers missed work because of a work-related injury. But, as Bouda says, “you have to move fast to make money.”