Since then, they have grown to thousands of members with support from the Brooklyn-based workers’ center Worker’s Justice Project. This is why bathrooms became a central focus for the delivery cyclists who came together last year to form Los Deliveristas Unidos, a collective of food delivery workers largely from Mexico and Guatemala, who began self-organizing early in the pandemic through Facebook and WhatsApp. “Because if you don’t find a McDonald’s around, you have to do it in the street or you’re gonna pee on yourself.” “You have to pee in the street basically like a dog,” Uber Eats driver Kouamé Kuado told me on the corner of West 148th Street and Broadway in Upper Manhattan, straddling his e-bike and clasping a Dunkin’ iced coffee in one hand. “You can’t force a restaurateur to let someone use the bathroom if they’re opposed to it,” another member replied. The response from the board was either surprising or not, depending on how closely you’ve been following the issue. “And bathroom access is as good a place as any to start.” We need to start treating them as if their lives and their working conditions mattered,” Ken Coughlin, a Community Board 7 Transportation Committee member, said in his introduction to the resolution. It seems obvious that they need somewhere to pee. While there isn’t anything like a definitive count, current estimates hold that there are between 50,000 and 80,000 of these workers in New York City-a number that surged in the pandemic. Earlier this week, StreetsBlog New York reported on a community board meeting in a wealthy Manhattan neighborhood where members debated a nonbinding proposal that would encourage restaurants to let app-based delivery workers use their bathrooms.
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