The delivery men, at the center of a new legal struggle in New York

This Wednesday a law was to go into effect so that food delivery people in New York will start earning $17.96 per hour. But a state court judge put the le on hold after door-to-door delivery app giants including Uber, Door Dash and Grabhub filed separate lawsuits to oppose it.

Alfredo, who delivers meals, says that without this law, the pay they receive for the distances they travel is not properly compensated.

“Supposedly they give a certain limit of where we have to go to get the order and go to deliver it but sometimes they go over, they go over the miles that what we put on the phone and sometimes they no longer pay for the order, supposedly they give 2 dollars and the delivery is supposedly 3 dollars”, says Alfredo Carrión, a Guatemalan food delivery man.

Silvy, who supports her son thanks to deliveries on her Bicycle, shows that her weekly payment was $88.50 and that for today, she has waited several hours and only made two deliveries.

“There it is shown that the Apps have never been concerned about the workers, they have never been by the worker’s side, at the times that the workers need it, when they have an accident, when they die, they have never been with them and now that finally the The law says that they have to pay us, they turn their backs on us as always,” says Antonio Solís, leader of the Deliveristas Unidos organization.

The applications argue that city officials justified the law based on poor studies and statistics, and that paying minimum wage to these workers considered independent contractors would mean additional costs of at least 15 percent to consumers and restaurants.

For its part, the New York Department of Consumer and Worker Protection said in a statement that they are extremely disappointed in this lawsuit that puts people who work as delivery drivers on hiatus.