Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images On a rainy evening in 2018, I had just picked up one of my first deliveries as a bicycle courier for Uber Eats — a medium-rare burger and fries, from a tavern near NYU — when the app chimed, asking if I wanted to pick up a different order from the same tavern for an extra $2.
I’ve been doing this on and off for three years now, and like other delivery workers, I recognize that this job is tough. But it’s experiences like these — unfair, unsafe, and underpaid, meted out by an uncaring algorithmic boss — that can make this work feel so demoralizing.
The bathroom issue is a clear example of the kind of neglect that happens when the lines of responsibility between platform, restaurant, and worker become blurred. It became frighteningly clear last year in the first days of lockdown, when couriers all around me were tasked with keeping the city fed, but lacked a safe place to pee or wash our hands. As a writer, I was able to take a break from delivery work then, but others didn’t have that luxury.
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