For $1.75 an hour, they put up with abusive
employers, muggers, rain, snow, potholes, car accidents, six-day weeks, and
lousy tips. Not anymore.
On Broadway on the Upper West Side, the ballet of the
deliverymen has begun. Armed with pizza boxes and plastic bags, men on bicycles
zip by, one after another, dodging taxis and Town Cars, SUVs and the M104.
Every night, it’s the same clashing of horns and bike bells, the same frenzy of
pedaling and panting and sweating. Between West 59th and West 115th Streets,
the number of places that offer food delivery now totals close to 275.
The deliverymen run the gamut from boys to older men,
from fit to flabby, but there are a few things they share in common: They are
virtually all immigrants—many from China—and most of them speak little or no
English. Among the neighborhood’s most experienced deliverymen is a 25-year-old
Chinese immigrant named Justin. For the last seven years, he has been speeding
around the streets of Manhattan delivering food for five different restaurants.
Now he works six days a week at Ollie’s Noodle Shop & Grille on the corner
of Broadway and 84th Street.
On a recent Saturday, Justin is assigned to the 6
p.m.-to-midnight shift. The busiest hours for a deliveryman are always 6 to 9
p.m., but on this night, in the middle of summer, the orders are slow. For the
first 25 minutes, Justin sits on the sidewalk with his co-workers, waiting. He
is the youngest among them, with a bit of a baby face, short spiky hair, two
small earrings in his left ear—and an American name, which he picked from an
electronic dictionary. At 6:26, he gets his first chance to work. He grabs two
bags off the counter, throws a leg over his bike, and barrels down 84th Street.
One call from a customer complaining about cold food
can be enough to get a deliveryman suspended, so Justin always pedals fast,
running red lights and cutting in front of traffic to cross the street.
Stopping on 85th between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive, he wraps his
chain around a pole, snaps shut the rusty padlock, grabs the bags of food, and
hits the buzzer—all this takes just four or five seconds. He collects $50
($46.82 for the order, $3.18 for a tip), and then he’s back on his bike seat,
one bag swinging from his handlebars.
Two minutes of pedaling later, he walks into a
building on West End, armed with $13.71 worth of Chinese food: beef with
garlic, spring roll, egg roll. He walks out with another $15 in his pocket.
“They gave me $1.29,” he says with a shrug. By the time Justin gets back to the
restaurant, it’s 6:39 p.m. His first round-trip of the evening—nearly one mile
of cycling—took thirteen minutes. Nearly an hour into his shift, he’s made just
$4.47 in tips.
In New York’s expanding service economy, deliverymen
occupy a position near the bottom—earning less than doormen, security guards,
nannies, maids, tailors, taxi drivers, and trash collectors and working in far
more treacherous conditions. They work long hours and cover huge territories,
often in inclement weather, dodging perils like potholes, taxi doors, and tow
trucks (one of which killed a deliveryman last year)—all the while hoping they
don’t get robbed along the way. And they do this for pay that is often less
than the minimum wage.
But that may be about to change. Since last fall,
some 70 Chinese deliverymen—including Justin and his co-workers at Ollie’s—have
filed lawsuits against five Manhattan restaurants. Never before have so many
restaurant deliverymen joined together to battle their bosses. It’s the Year of
the Chinese Deliverymen—the year they decided to revolt.
The genesis of the deliverymen’s uprising can be
traced back to a single incident that happened last summer at Our Place
Cuisines of China, a restaurant on the Upper East Side. Deliveryman Guo Z. Wu,
38, says he and his fellow workers were routinely cursed at, and one day he
decided he’d had enough of the poor treatment. (Like most of the deliverymen,
Wu speaks little English, and he tells his story with the help of a
translator.) On this day, Wu says, he walked into the restaurant and saw the
“big boss,” general manager and co-owner Kong Ping Chen. “He yelled at me in a
very rude way,” Wu says. “I walked out, but on the way to the door, I murmured,
‘You bastard!’ ”—Wang ba dan!—“He heard it. He then rushed to me, grabbed my
collar, and said, ‘I dare you to repeat it!’ I said, ‘If you feel insulted by
the curse word, think how we workers feel when you use curse words on us so
often!’”
Not surprisingly, Wu was fired. (Chen declined to
comment.) At the time, it seemed like little more than an everyday
boss-versus-deliveryman dispute. Then Wu found his way to the Chinese Staff and
Workers’ Association, an activist organization in Chinatown, which is part of a
campaign fighting for better labor conditions known as Justice Will Be Served.
Wu recruited his co-workers, some of whom had also been fired, to join him. The
organizers set them up with an attorney, and last August, Wu and nine other
deliverymen filed a lawsuit against Our Place, charging that the restaurant
paid most of them just $1.75 an hour—an allegation the restaurant’s owners have
denied in court papers. (State law requires restaurants to pay deliverymen at
least $4.85 an hour.)
News of Wu’s standing up to the “big boss” spread
quickly through the deliveryman community, especially the contingent that comes
from the Fujian province in southeast China. Over the past 25 or so years,
several hundred thousand people have immigrated to New York City from Fujian.
Most grew up in a handful of rural counties outside Fuzhou City, in villages
that are now nearly devoid of young people. Some, like Justin, left when they
were just out of school; others held low-wage jobs—farmer, taxi driver, truck
driver, carpenter—before leaving China. Once they get to New York, they connect
with friends or relatives and find jobs that don’t require any English skills,
often as restaurant deliverymen.
Although some Chinese deliverymen are working
legally, many are undocumented. But employers are required by law to pay
minimum wage and overtime to all of their workers, regardless of legal status.
And you don’t need a green card to file a lawsuit against your employer. (There
is little risk of deportation, as the courts don’t require plaintiffs to reveal
their immigration status.) After Wu and his co-workers sued Our Place, it
wasn’t long before the deliverymen at Saigon Grill, Ollie’s, and Republic
joined in. In late July, deliverymen at yet another restaurant—the recently
shuttered Rosie & Ting Noodles & Grille in the East Village—sued their
employer as well, making this a five-restaurant revolt.
The battle over Saigon Grill has become the focal
point of the deliverymen’s energies because, in the words of one organizer,
“it’s like cutting off the head.” Many of the deliverymen from other
restaurants, including Wu and Justin, have also worked at Saigon Grill, and of
the restaurants being sued, the deliverymen say Saigon Grill was the worst. “If
we win this case, every restaurant is going to change,” says Yu Guan Ke, 36,
who worked at Saigon Grill for ten years. “If we lose or give up, every
restaurant will have this situation.”
On a recent Saturday afternoon, seventeen deliverymen
picketed outside Saigon Grill on University Place, in Greenwich Village,
shouting so loudly they could be heard a block away: “Boycott!” “Saigon Grill!”
“Boycott!” “Saigon Grill!” Around their necks, they wore homemade signs with
Magic Marker slogans: GRILL THE OWNERS. DEMAND FAIR WAGES. Wu was in the crowd,
as were Justin and four of his co-workers from Ollie’s. “We go to the pickets
all the time to get our sweat-and-blood money back from the owner,” says
Justin.
For the past four months, the men have been
protesting at the Vietnamese restaurant’s two locations—here and on the Upper
West Side—ten times a week. (There are actually three Saigon Grills, but the
one on the Upper East Side is closed for renovations.) Many of the protesters
were fired from Saigon Grill in March, when the owner, Simon Nget, shut down
his entire delivery operation after the men tried to form a union. On this
afternoon, Nget’s nephew stood next to the front door with a video camera
trained on the protesters. Nget himself used to come out and distribute flyers
telling his side of this story, but these days he stays inside; when the
deliverymen protest at the Upper West Side restaurant, he uses the back
entrance to avoid their jeers.
Before the conflict began, Saigon Grill had an
enormous delivery business. The restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue and 90th Street
employed 22 deliverymen, an unusually large number—and it was famous for the
quick legs of its deliverymen; Zagat’s 2006 review called its delivery service
“lightning fast.” This was especially remarkable considering the size of Saigon
Grill’s delivery zone: Its menu promised delivery up to 40 blocks or more.
Deliverymen at the Upper West Side location recount dropping off orders from
midtown to northern Harlem. Some deliveries were so far away the round-trip
could take close to an hour.
The lawsuit—and the stories the deliverymen
tell—reveals the cost of keeping such an operation running. According to the
deliverymen, they had to report to work on their day off anytime it rained or
was especially cold—lucrative conditions for food delivery. “There’s a policy:
If it’s 25 degrees or less, everyone has to go to work or they’re fired,” Wu
says. They say they also had to buy and repair their own bikes and were forced
to pay fines ranging from $20 to $200 for transgressions like slamming a door
or being late with a delivery. The deliverymen also charge that their wages
were, in effect, diminished because they sometimes had to pay to eat, violating
standard industry practice. “They never cooked enough food for us,” says Yu
Guan Ke, the lead plaintiff in the case. Once the food provided was gone, the
deliverymen had to order from the menu—and unlike the kitchen staff and the
waiters, they had to pay for the food themselves. The deliverymen say they had
little choice but to spend their tip money on dinner, since speeding around on
a bike for hours when you’re hungry is close to impossible.
Worse are the stories about the way the restaurant
handled the two great dangers of the deliveryman’s job: injuries and robberies.
In both cases, the deliverymen say, they were often forced to reimburse the
restaurant’s owner if they were hurt or mugged. Xian Yi, 25, lifts one pant leg
to show where a truck crashed into him in 2004. He says he fractured his lower
leg, rode to the hospital in an ambulance, and got stuck reimbursing the owner
for part of his medical bill. “The boss asked for $600, so I had to pay $600,”
says Xian Yi. He had to borrow from three co-workers in order to afford the
payment. Another deliveryman, Jian Yun, was robbed two years ago in the lobby
of an apartment building. “Suddenly a guy came from the back and he had a gun,”
he says. “I was so scared, I gave him the money.” The thief made off with $200
in cash and $60 worth of food. When he got back to Saigon Grill, Jian Yun says,
“the first question is, ‘Where’s the money?’ They don’t ask ‘How are you? Are
you okay? Did you get hurt?’”
For their trouble, the deliverymen say they were paid
a sum of money—typically $500 or $600 a month—that often had little
relationship to the hours they worked or to the minimum wage. (In their
lawsuit, the Saigon Grill deliverymen contend that some of them were paid as
little as $1.70 an hour.) The rest of their income came from tips. The
deliverymen say that customers usually tip $2 or maybe $3 per order. On a good
night, a deliveryman could make $60 in tips. Depending on his base pay, he
could earn between $20,000 and $25,000 a year.
Beyond basic New York living expenses, the
deliverymen have relatives in China to support and some have smuggling debts to
repay. The journey from Fujian to New York City typically involves hiring a “snakehead”
to smuggle you into the country, leaving you with a debt so huge you have to
work nonstop for years to dig out of it. A decade ago, the price to be smuggled
was $40,000 or $50,000; now it can climb as high as $70,000. The myriad routes
snakeheads use to get their “snakes” into the U.S. are astonishing in their
variety: sneaking across the Canadian border; traveling from Malaysia to
Mexico, then swimming across the border to Texas; flying straight into Kennedy
airport, armed with a fake visa; hopscotching from Serbia to Hungary to Aruba
and then to New York. Not paying your smuggling debt is not an option: Those
who don’t pay up run the risk of being kidnapped, tortured, and killed.
Saigon Grill’s owner Simon Nget is Chinese, too, but
his coming-to-America story is very different from those of the deliverymen. He
grew up in Cambodia and fled the Khmer Rouge with his family. In 1981, eight
family members—Nget, his parents, two sisters, a brother, and two nephews—came
to New York City as refugees and were settled into an apartment on East 187th
Street in the Fordham section of the Bronx. Nget’s father had owned a general
store in Cambodia; in New York, both parents found jobs in a garment factory.
Nget graduated from Theodore Roosevelt High School
and did a year and a half of college, but eventually dropped out and supported
himself by waiting tables in Chinese restaurants. At 26, he bought his first
business—a coffee shop in Long Island City—with tips he’d saved up and
contributions from his family. Six years later, he sold the coffee shop and
opened the first Saigon Grill, paying $100,000 to take over an ailing
restaurant and signing a $9,000-a-month lease.
Now that he has achieved the classic immigrant dream
of entrepreneurial success, Nget has been beset by legal tangles. The subject
of the deliverymen’s lawsuit makes him bewildered and angry. “I work hard,” he
says. “I take good care of people. I’m not a guy who lives in a big building.
I’m a family man.”
Today he lives with his parents, wife, two children,
and assorted other relatives—a total of 21 people—in two two-family houses next
door to each other in College Point, Queens. Just about all of them work at
Saigon Grill: Nget’s wife, Michelle, their two children, and all seven of the
relatives who left Cambodia with him. His sister is an assistant manager, his
brother is a host, his nephews tend bar, and even his 78-year-old parents help
out, with his mother making dumplings while his father repairs chairs and fixes
the broken teapots.
Nget says his troubles with the deliverymen started
long before the pickets and the lawsuit. “They don’t cooperate with you,” he
says. “They gamble outside. They spit. Sometimes they fight. You cannot really
control them. They do whatever they want.” In a flyer he distributed to
customers, he likened the men’s behavior to that of “thugs” and “gangsters.”
“Everybody in Chinatown knows these men from the Fujian province”—particularly
those from Changle, the area where many of the deliverymen come from—“they know
this little village—the people are very no good,” Nget says. “The people are
very, very no good.”
Nget denies all of the allegations in the
deliverymen’s lawsuit. “They make up stories,” he says. “Everything they say is
not true.” He always put out enough food for them, he says, and he never made
anyone pay for their own medical expenses. But he refuses to say how much he
paid the deliverymen: “After the taxes and meals are factored in, everything is
lawful.” So he was deducting the cost of meals from the deliverymen’s wages?
“No,” he says, contradicting himself, “it’s a free meal.” Nget prefers to talk
about how much the men made in tips. “If you add the two together, they make
$20 or $30 or $40 an hour,” he says. “They make more than enough.”
Nget claims he dismantled his delivery operation
because the deliverymen were trying to “extort” money from him by threatening
to sue. The decision has put a big dent in his business. Nget estimates that
delivery made up 25 percent of his revenues and that Saigon Grill’s delivery
orders used to total about $200,000 a month. To offset this lost revenue, he
has raised his prices 10 percent for customers who dine in. “If I didn’t
increase that 10 percent, I couldn’t afford it,” he says. But the deliverymen’s
protests are having an effect on the dine-in business as well. “It affects a
lot,” says Nget. “Many people don’t come.”
Nget is not about to give in. But the deliverymen may
soon have one victory: The owners of Our Place have been negotiating with them,
and it seems likely they will settle the lawsuit. The agreement is still being
finalized and the amount remains confidential, but the sum will be split among
the deliverymen who sued that restaurant, a group that includes both Wu—the
original instigator—and Justin, who worked at Our Place for two years before
Ollie’s.
And the deliverymen’s lawsuits and pickets are
beginning to have a ripple effect in the industry, inspiring other immigrants
to sue for fair wages. Deliverymen from Flor de Mayo, a Chinese-Latin
restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue, noticed the protests taking place seven blocks
north, outside Saigon Grill. On July 20, four deliverymen, all immigrants from
Mexico, filed a lawsuit against Flor de Mayo, heralding a new wave in this
deliveryman revolt.
On this Saturday night, Justin doesn’t yet know about
the Our Place settlement. At the moment he is more concerned with the same
questions that preoccupy him every night: How many more orders will he get? How
much money will he make? And is it going to start raining before he gets off
work?
Between 6 and 10:30 p.m., he dropped off nearly
twenty orders. Most were small—$15.99, $15.39, $11.87—and yielded small tips.
Two nights earlier, he’d had more luck: He’d delivered an $80 order to 11
Riverside Drive and collected a $12 tip. This night isn’t shaping up too badly,
though. At least the weather is cooperating: Just an occasional drizzle, and
the temperature hasn’t climbed past 82. And he hasn’t had to deliver any orders
to those buildings, mostly along Central Park West, where the doormen carry the
food upstairs—and are notorious for keeping some of the tip for themselves.
Shortly before 11 p.m., Justin stands alone outside
Ollie’s, waiting for his next order and watching the couples leaving the Loews
theater across Broadway, walking arm-in-arm. Slouching against the side of the
restaurant, he pulls out a pack of Marlboro Lights and rests a cigarette
between his lips. Deliveryman can be a lonely job. Night after night, he walks
in and out of the same buildings, delivering food to the same people. He hands
them their order, they give him the money, then they shut the door. It’s rare
that anyone realizes they’ve seen him before. “Most of them are old customers,”
he says. “I recognize them, but I’m not sure they can recognize me.” In fact,
before Justin started going to the Saigon Grill pickets and met the organizers,
he’d never had an extended conversation with a native-born American.
Finally, at 11:22, a bag of food appears on the
counter inside. Justin grabs it and races east on his bicycle, just one block.
The kitchen closes in about fifteen minutes, so he figures this may be his
final delivery. Then, at 11:43, two more orders come up and he’s dashing north
up Broadway. His last stop of the evening is on 87th Street, between Columbus Avenue
and Central Park West, on a block with few potholes and no traffic. Trees line
both sides of the street, their branches forming a canopy over his head,
offering a rare moment of serenity at the end of a grueling shift.
He drops off his last order at 11:52, and in the end,
this evening turns out to be no better or worse than most. He collected a total
of 23 tips—the largest was $4.76—and when he adds them all up, they come to
$59.36.
He pedals back to Ollie’s to lock up his bicycle, and
soon he’ll be on his way home, to a tiny, $300-a-month cubicle on the second
floor of a residential house in Jackson Heights, a floor he shares with six men
from different parts of China, garment workers and factory workers, none of
whom he really knows. By the time he gets in, it’s 1 or 1:30 a.m. and he’s
usually hungry but too exhausted to cook. So he does what any New Yorker would
do: He pulls out his cell phone and orders food. He always calls the same
Fuzhou restaurant, which stays open until 2 a.m., and on a $10 or $12 order, he
makes a point of giving the deliveryman a $3 tip.
Additional reporting by Rong Xiaoqing.
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