On a rainy October morning in 2020, a small group of organizers and worker leaders of the Workers’ Justice Project (WJP), a locally based worker center in New York City, gathered near Central Park for a march they had organized to bring attention to the precarious conditions of app-based couriers. Such conditions had only been exacerbated because of the COVID-19 crisis, and the goal of the organizers was to mobilize delivery workers to promote local-level policies that would address the most pressing issues the workers were facing, including lack of access to bathrooms, electric bike robberies accompanied by violent crime, and low pay from the apps.
