NEW YORK, United States | “A friend needs help getting his bike back! “. The request appears on the “Delivery Boys United” WhatsApp group, with the location of the emergency. Accusing the New York police of “passivity”, delivery men have banded together to defend themselves against thefts and assaults.
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A victim of assault himself, Vicente Carrasco, a 39-year-old Mexican, created this group in March to defend against thefts, especially of electric bikes, which can cost more than $ 3,000 and, along with phones, constitute essential work tools.
Every evening, after a long day at work, he and a handful of other “deliveristas” (a term made up of the verb ” deliver ») Gather at the exit of the Queens Bridge, Manhattan side, to help if one of their colleagues is in difficulty.
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“If there is a GPS on the (stolen) bike, we follow it,” he told AFP. But the motto is “don’t go alone”.
“When there are many of us, we always try to get it back,” but “we don’t want to risk our lives too much. You don’t know if people are armed, ”explains Vicente Carrasco.
His group works alongside three others, such as “El Chapin en dos Ruedas”, which brings together more than 1,000 “deliveristas” across the boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. Thanks to their efforts, they sometimes manage to get their property back.
“Not violent”
One of Vicente’s comrades, José Rodrigo Nevares justifies this organization: “my bike allows me to eat, to feed my family, to pay my rent”.
“I can’t let them take it away from me,” he explains.
Unlike other groups, among New York’s more than 65,000 delivery boys, the Delivery Boys have decided to take justice into their own hands.
“When you call the police if you have been robbed, they never come (…) We have organized ourselves to be able to defend ourselves, to be faster”, explains Vicente Carrasco, who specifies however: “We are not violent” .
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And in a community where 80% are undocumented, according to the associations that defend them, many do not go to the police “out of fear”, says José Rodrigo Nevares, a former waiter turned delivery man after losing his job during the pandemic.
Questioned by AFP, the city police (New York Police Department, NYPD) on the contrary assured “take these crimes very seriously” and that for “the victims worried because of their immigration status (undocumented ), the NYPD is not questioning them and will not question them about it ”.
These self-defense practices, which Vicente Carrasco brought from Guerrero, his native state in Mexico, are not unanimous.
“They create a lot of violence and our fear is that someone will be hurt,” Ligia Guallpa, director of the Worker’s Justice Project, which defends the rights of low-paid workers, told AFP.
But the working conditions of these delivery men, mainly from countries in Latin America, Africa or Asia, are “inhuman”, she laments, pointing to “a sector where there is no social protection.
“Essential, but unprotected”
With an average salary of $ 2,345 per month, delivery people do not get the same treatment as the service industry, where the hourly wage is $ 15 in New York City.
According to a report from the Worker’s Justice Project, in collaboration with the Worker’s Institute at Cornell University, among 500 delivery people surveyed, 54% have already been victims of their bicycle theft. And among them, 30% have been assaulted, says the study, titled “Essential but unprotected.”
According to Ligia Guallpa, the delivery people still won a small victory: from next year, they will be able to use the toilets of the restaurants where they will collect their cargo, limit the distances to be covered, fully receive the tips left by customers and no longer have to pay $ 60 to $ 70 to buy the bag needed for delivery.
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The deliverers and the associations that defend them point to the increase in income from applications in recent years, further boosted by confinements.
“They make a profit because they charge both customers and restaurants and have no commitment to delivery people, who are freelancers,” the Worker’s Justice Project report says.
“We have to change the system, otherwise we won’t change the root of the problem,” adds Ligia Guallpa.
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