William Lopez, a 55-year-old Puerto Rican born Queens resident, works tirelessly to provide for his family, where he puts money aside to put his son through law school, pay for his wife’s medical needs, cover his daughter’s college tuition, as well as send money back home to relatives in Puerto Rico.
Lopez, who works a full-time job, aims to meet these needs by moonlighting as a courier with DoorDash. Starting in 2019, he began working with the food delivery company to pay for his wife’s heart transplant. In addition to the income from his fulltime job, Lopez typically makes over $1,700 a month working around 30-hours a week as a dasher.
Door dashing has become a significant source of his income for the past six years, and as Lopez puts it, the company has become “part of my family.”
“Believe it or not, me doing DoorDash was helping me a lot. After taxes, paying rent, paying bills it’s not enough. So, when you have a daughter going to college you have to make money. It was giving me a break where I didn’t have to go out there and kill myself looking for another job,” he said.
However, just last month, Lopez only made $200 from 14 deliveries, a staggering change from his typical rate of close to 200 deliveries a month. Lopez’s dip in income, he said, could be attributed to a new policy the NYC Department of Consumer and Workers Protection issued in June 2023.
The policy created a rule that makes third party delivery companies pay their workers a minimum wage rate based on a set formula.
There’s two ways companies are permitted to pay workers.
One method is to pay them $29.93 per hour for all time spent on deliveries from when the order is accepted to drop off, or to pay $17.96 per hour– from time acceptance to delivery time–with an additional weekly bonus for active dashers based on the amount of time they spend on the app looking for orders to fill.
In response to the policy, DoorDash has paid its couriers $29.93 per hour, and…
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