From threat to essentially sacrificial: racial capitalism, (im)mobilities, and food delivery workers in New York City during Covid-19

Abstract

As Covid-19 spread quickly, New York City (NYC) designated food delivery as essential and stopped policing the electric bikes ridden by ‘threatening’ delivery workers. We use racial capitalism to examine how becoming essential reconfigured the labor mobilities of NYC food delivery workers to maintain and create accumulations of racial capitalism in a crisis of pandemic-induced (im)mobilities. This research draws from pre-pandemic and during-pandemic data collections including analyses of governmental documents, surveys, interviews, focus groups, and public data to understand the value extracted from the essential designation of food delivery. Pre-pandemic labor conditions extracted value from food delivery mobility by offloading risks and costs through informal working conditions and policing. Designating food delivery as essential produced new arrangements of uneven (im)mobilities that built upon preexisting conditions of delivery mobility that extracted novel values by intensifying, altering, and creating sacrificial hazards and burdens for workers. However, the embodied incongruencies and fissures of being essential conversely fueled organizing by delivery workers to use their essential narrative to secure local labor victories. The fissures of the essential designation in food delivery indicate critical junctures between racial capitalism and (im)mobilities for possible future accumulations and interventions.

Keywords:

• Racial capitalism
• mobility
• Covid-19
• food delivery
• informality
• essential labor
• e-bikes

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the many volunteers of the Biking Public Project, our food delivery worker partners, and WIEGO partners. We are also grateful for paper feedback from Lina Newton, Helen Chang, Joan Robinson, Elizabeth Edenberg, Rahul Pathak, Bryan Weber, Mimi Sheller, Adonia Lugo, and Nick Wong.

Data availability statement

The survey data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, DJL, upon reasonable request. The OATH policing data were derived from the following resource available in the public domain: NYC Open Data at https://data.cityofnewyork.us/City-Government/OATH-Hearings-Division-Case-Status/jz4z-kudi/data

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The names of delivery workers interviewed and surveyed in this study are changed into pseudonyms. For public hearing testimonies, names are kept the same as in the public record.

2 These figures are drawn by the author from the public database of the NYC Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings (OATH).

3 Our participatory action research project team comprised NYC delivery workers and volunteers from the Biking Public Project (BPP), a volunteer-based grassroots organization.

4 In the WIEGO survey, three of the sixty survey respondents identified as women. This data was not sufficient however for an intersectional analysis of precarities, risks, and extractions across gender differences.

5 The U.S. legalized the import, sale, and ownership of motorized scooters such as e-bikes in 2002. However, this law requires each state to pass state-level legislation about motorized scooters to create new vehicle classifications and to determine public use. In the absence of state-level legislation, NY State treated e-bikes as legal to buy and own, but illegal to ride in public spaces. This lasted until 2020 when NY State passed a state-level law legalizing and defining public use of e-bikes.

6 The NYPD summonses were changed in mid-2017 so that police officers visually assess and mark the perceived race (‘White’, ‘Black’, ‘Hisp. White’, ‘Hisp. Black’, ‘Am. Ind/Alaskan Native’, ‘Asian/Pacific Is’) of the person being given a summons.

7 The DCWP proposed a minimum wage of $23.82 per hour excluding tips ($19.86 base rate, $1.70 for the absence of workers’ compensation insurance, and $2.26 for workers’ expenses) in November 2022. The DCWP reduced this wage in $19.96 per hour excluding tips in March 2023. NYC has adopted this wage, but delivery platforms have filed a lawsuit to block implementation.

Additional information

Funding

Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing