Israel Lausell, 41, works between six and eight hours a day making evening deliveries in Manhattan for Uber Eats and Grubhub in addition to his day job at the New York City Department of Education. It is not easy money. “I’ve fallen on my bike. I’ve gotten hit by a car,” he said.
For delivery workers like him, the weather and the uncertainty are the worst: “Sometimes we’ve made 20 bucks — and we’ve been out here all day long.”
The coronavirus pandemic brought with it an explosion of demand for doorstep deliveries. In New York City, there are now an estimated 65,000 delivery workers, riding bikes and scooters, day and night, often in terrible weather. But the city has created very little infrastructure to support this work force.
New York City has fewer than 1,200 public restrooms. It has a problem with vehicles parked in or veering into bike lanes, and an abundance of hostile architecture — ostensibly public plazas that are designed to deter people from resting.
Delivery workers have been pushing for better and more consistent pay, but the physical logistics of their work have become a new focus of both government officials and workers’ rights advocates. And on the Upper East Side, one corporate experiment has shown the possibilities and limitations of making their working conditions a bit more comfortable.
It is a tough job, and the city’s delivery workers are facing “many, many challenges,” said Ligia Guallpa, the executive director of the Worker’s Justice Project, which represents a cohort of delivery workers called Los Deliveristas Unidos.
In February, the Southern fried-chicken sandwich chain Chick-fil-A opened a serene, loft-like storefront space on Third Avenue near East 83rd Street called the Brake Room, intending it to serve as a haven for food delivery workers. A temporary experiment, it closed last Thursday, a company representative said.
But interviews with delivery workers who had visited the Brake Room made clear that there was a void in the system. Workers as young as 19 and as old as 48 said they were thankful to have a chance to sit down, charge their phones, use the bathroom, eat lunch brought from home or just be somewhere quiet for a few minutes.
Asked where he would go when the space closed, one delivery worker shrugged. “Just outside,” he said.
There are other similar projects underway. The Worker’s Justice Project, in partnership with the city, intends to create hubs — by repurposing abandoned newsstands — for delivery workers to rest and charge their phones and electric bikes.
Two Manhattan locations are being considered for an initial pilot, one near City Hall and one on the Upper West Side. The program is very much in the early stages, but so far, the community board on the Upper West Side has “overwhelmingly negative” feelings about it, noting that the proposed intersection is already busy and congested.
The Worker’s Justice Project also intends to create a rest stop even more comprehensive than the Brake Room, in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. It will include access to education, training and support, Mr. Guallpa said. Workers will be able to get legal advice and learn how to charge their e-bike batteries safely and make repairs.
Still, with tens of thousands of delivery workers, one sheltered space and two Manhattan charging stations can’t meet all of their needs.
Sorting out who is responsible for the welfare of delivery workers is complicated. The riders are considered independent contractors, so they receive no guaranteed base pay. And they are not paid for the time they have to wait between deliveries, even as the apps they work for rely on them to be constantly available.
In 2021, New York passed a sweeping bill that set a minimum wage for delivery workers and established minimum per-trip payments, but the amount has not yet been decided.
On a recent weekday around 2:30 p.m., almost all of the seats in the Brake Room were occupied. A mix of salsa and Latin jazz wafted from speakers hung high above exposed brick walls.
Each person sitting at the half-dozen two-top cafe tables had multiple phones. Some were charging the phones, others were watching videos or texting and a few were playing video games.
Men got cups of coffee from a stand installed in the middle of the room. Chipper employees handed out bottles of water. One man sat on a leather couch, leaned his head back and closed his eyes.
Chick-fil-A called the Brake Room “an act of community care,” but it also used the space to conduct focus groups and case studies, investigating the needs of delivery workers.
For instance, as the space was being designed, delivery workers who were interviewed requested supportive chairs; they ride bikes all day, and their backs hurt. “We had all these stools, and we were like, Cancel the stools!” said Katie Joiner, a member of Chick-fil-A’s marketing team.
The Brake Room may also have been a tactical attempt to counteract neighborhood negativity. Shortly after the Upper East Side Chick-fil-A restaurant opened on Third Avenue in 2019, it became known for attracting a crowd of delivery workers. A December 2021 community board meeting addressed what residents described as “curbside, sidewalk and roadway congestion caused by double parking and delivery tents in the parking lane.”
The Brake Room experiment has also been an opportunity for the Atlanta-based company to learn how New York operates. In other, more car-oriented cities, Chick-fil-A drive-throughs are known for having long lines. Other cities don’t have the large fleets of two-wheeled deliverers like New York does. A person making deliveries by car can rest in the vehicle, maybe use the bathroom at a gas station. New York is different. And Chick-fil-A restaurants in the city, like a lot of other eateries in New York, rely on their delivery business: Approximately half of the Upper East Side Chick-fil-A’s annual sales are from delivery orders.
Ms. Joiner acknowledged that it had been an educational experience. “We’re going to kind of take all these learnings and figure out, OK, well, what does this mean moving forward? What are ways that we can continue to show up for this community?”
The Brake Room was also a chance to earn some positive publicity. When Chick-fil-A first arrived in New York City in 2015, Christine Quinn, then a City Council member, denounced the chain, pointing to its chief executive’s opposition to gay marriage and the millions of dollars the company had donated to organizations fighting same-sex marriage. (That executive has since stepped down.)
This much is true: The delivery workers who had been inside the Brake Room loved it. Some were visibly upset when informed that it would be discontinued. They spoke of being treated rudely at other establishments when they asked to use the restroom or tried to sit down for a while.
“Honestly, just one place? It’s not enough,” said Mr. Lausell. Although, he said, he was not surprised that the Brake Room was about to shut down. When he first heard about it, he said, he thought, “This is very weird. They’re paying so much rent. Plus, they’re giving away snacks. They’re giving away water. They’re giving away coffee. That costs money.”
But he understood, he said. “I think what they’re trying to do is spread the word — that we need help. We need places that we can go to and not only warm up, you know, charge the batteries. And, you know, just relax a little bit. As I said, this is not easy.”