NEW YORK — A protest act organized this Tuesday in New York by the New York food delivery group Justice Workers Project to ask for a living wage, ended in a brawl between representatives of this association and about thirty delivery people who reject their mediation before The authorities.
The director of this organization, Ligia Guallpa, had organized a press conference in front of the Mayor’s Office to denounce the decision announced Tuesday by the authorities to postpone for a longer time the imposition of a minimum payment per hour to the 65,000 food distributors in Nueva York, known as “deliverists.”
Last November, the Mayor’s Office proposed a payment of $23.82 an hour, but later, the Department of Consumption and Labor Protection set the salary at $17.96 for this year and $19.86 in 2025.
However, the authorities have decided to postpone for the moment the entry into force of the measure, which, Guallpa told EFE, will allow food applications such as Doordash and Grubhub to increase their pressure on legislators to try to further reduce those amounts.
Guallpa could not speak in public, because moments before the event began, a delivery man identified as Octavio López began to accuse the members of this group of corruption and of not distributing the subsidies and prizes received among all the delivery men.
While he faced those present and prevented the press conference from starting, he recorded with his mobile phone and broadcast the anger live.
Little by little, up to thirty delivery men summoned by López, who doubled the number of representatives of the “Justice Workers Project” (one of his unions), began to arrive and join in the sabotage of the act, which finally could not be held.
“We are divided. Today is a very sad day,” Guallpa acknowledged in a hint of a press conference, in which he stressed that in the end “the only ones who win are the companies.”
“This is the result of the frustration, of the rage that exists in the streets after two years of struggle,” added the activist, before insisting that this Tuesday’s decision by the Mayor’s Office causes more “uncertainty, more division and more worry”.
Currently, the salary of the deliverists is limited to the tips they receive from the customers and according to the Justice Workers Project, they have to make an initial investment of about 10,000 dollars to start working as delivery drivers and between 500 and 1,000 dollars a month for other needs. that are not covered by the applications.