From threat to essentially sacrificial: racial capitalism, (im)mobilities, and food delivery workers in New York City during Covid-19

Abstract

As Covid-19 spread quickly, New York City (NYC) designated food delivery as essential and stopped policing the electric bikes ridden by ‘threatening’ delivery workers. We use racial capitalism to examine how becoming essential reconfigured the labor mobilities of NYC food delivery workers to maintain and create accumulations of racial capitalism in a crisis of pandemic-induced (im)mobilities. This research draws from pre-pandemic and during-pandemic data collections including analyses of governmental documents, surveys, interviews, focus groups, and public data to understand the value extracted from the essential designation of food delivery. Pre-pandemic labor conditions extracted value from food delivery mobility by offloading risks and costs through informal working conditions and policing. Designating food delivery as essential produced new arrangements of uneven (im)mobilities that built upon preexisting conditions of delivery mobility that extracted novel values by intensifying, altering, and creating sacrificial hazards and burdens for workers. However, the embodied incongruencies and fissures of being essential conversely fueled organizing by delivery workers to use their essential narrative to secure local labor victories. The fissures of the essential designation in food delivery indicate critical junctures between racial capitalism and (im)mobilities for possible future accumulations and interventions.