Advocates look to pass bills to make it easier to tip delivery workers
City lawmakers have started weighing a series of bills concerning delivery workers and food delivery apps.
One would return the tipping option to a customer’s checkout before they submit their order. The other would require the minimum gratuity suggestion to be set at 10% of an order’s cost.
Advocates said delivery apps have made it more difficult for customers to tip after workers won a minimum wage standard in 2021.
The standard took effect last year after delays. However, when it was rolled out, advocates said popular apps like DoorDash and Uber Eats removed the option to tip workers until after the order is delivered.
City Councilmember Shaun Abreu, who is the lead sponsor of the bills and represents parts of Morningside Heights, down to the Upper West Side, and Ligia Guallpa, the executive director of the Workers Justice Project, the group behind Los Deliveristas Unidos, joined NY1 political anchor Errol Louis on “Inside City Hall” Thursday to discuss more.
“We want to work with City Council to figure out more comprehensive ways that is more that is not about penalizing [for] Deliveristas to actually be hurt by a broken systemic issue that they’re experiencing, especially by forcing them to encounter with NYPD now with this new law,” Guallpa said.
In a statement, a DoorDash spokesperson characterized the Council’s proposals a “‘one step forward, three steps back’ approach to policymaking with respect to platforms like ours.”
“The far-reaching bills considered completely ignore the harmful impacts that they will have, while doing little to solve the issues they seek to address – or worse, creating even more problems in the process,” the spokesperson continued.