“Is the food okay?”

That was the first message Gustavo received after notifying the app company he worked for that an e-bike had slipped on black ice and sent him flying to the ground in Chelsea while rushing to complete a delivery in December 2020.

In an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island, Chris told management that a direct report was showing signs of Covid-19. The response? “Keep it hush-hush.”

During the dark times of the pandemic, essential workers—from those who got sick and still put in 60 hours a week in Amazon warehouses just to get by, to those biking through cities relying only on tips to deliver warm food to your door during lockdown—were invisible and silenced.

We know because we lived it. As essential workers in New York City, we both have experienced what it’s like to be taken advantage of and disregarded by giant companies firsthand. That’s why we have been organizing for two years, building worker movements that stand up to corporations that denied us the dignity of a living wage and basic protections.

And thanks to the collective power of essential workers, we made strides in demanding our seat at the table. We unionized the first Amazon warehouse, and Los Deliveristas Unidos, a collective group of workers organized by the Worker’s Justice Project, secured a commitment from New York City of a minimum wage for food delivery workers beginning this year.

Today, our fight is far from over. The Adams administration failed to meet the deadline to enact the...

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