If you’re ordering chicken nuggets or Pad Thai when the air quality is officially “hazardous” to breathe, you probably should be tipping more. (And naturally, the same goes for any other natural disaster.)
Food delivery drivers hope that’s the message people take to heart after wildfire smoke blanketed the Midwest and East Coast earlier this month, creating terrible breathing conditions for anyone outside.
It was especially bad in New York City, where some 60,000 people do deliveries for apps like Uber, Grubhub and DoorDash.
Gustavo Ajche is one of them. He was biking around making food deliveries during the worst wildfire smoke. Tips were hit or miss, he told HuffPost.
“I did notice that people were tipping a bit more ― maybe $6 or $7 instead of $4 ― but there is no shortage of people who do not give a tip, and as a delivery person, that frustrates us because we depend on tips,” said Ajche, who delivers for DoorDash and GrubHub and also does construction work.
Ajche, who’s the founder of the labor group Los Deliveristas Unidos and a member of the Workers Justice Project, a group that fights for better working conditions and higher wages for immigrant workers, masked up during his deliveries, but it was impossible to keep the smoke out of his eyes.
It’s not the first time he’s endured extreme weather or environmental factors during his work, and Ajche doesn’t expect it to be the last. As climate emergencies become more and more common across the U.S. ― hurricanes, wildfires, flooding and high winds, even in unexpected places ― delivery drivers are becoming a new class of essential workers. (Of course, we also became highly dependent on them during the pandemic.)
“Our jobs are essential work that makes life easier for thousands and thousands of people who may not be able to go out,” Ajche said. “I personally have been on the streets several times in big winter storms. In 2010 there was a big snowstorm where I remember it was very…
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