Gig Work Isn’t What it Promises for Black and Latino New Yorkers
David R. Jones, The Urban Agenda
For years, gig work has been sold to New Yorkers as flexibility. Work when you want. Be your own boss. Make extra money on your own schedule. But for many workers—especially Black and Latino New Yorkers—that’s not what the job actually looks like.
A new report from the Community Service Society of New York takes a closer look at gig work across New York State. What we found is that gig work is becoming a core part of how people get by. One in five New Yorkers now earns money through gig platforms, and for half of those workers, it’s their main source of income.
And importantly, not everyone is doing this work at the same rate. Workers of color are more likely to be in the gig economy than white workers, reflecting the same patterns we see across the labor market—higher unemployment, fewer stable job opportunities, and more reliance on unstable, low-security work to make ends meet.
That context matters because it shapes how people experience gig work. When you don’t have other options, you have less room to say no.
What our survey shows is that gig work today is defined less by flexibility and more by control—exercised not by a human boss, but by the app that assigns jobs, sets pay, and tracks how workers are doing.
Concerns About Racialized Ratings Bias Affecting Earnings and Hiring
Nearly four in five gig workers said the app pushes them to work longer hours or at specific times through alerts, bonuses, and other incentives. Seventy percent said the app controls when, where, and how much they work, and 69 percent said they feel constantly monitored while working. The app is always watching, always measuring, always adjusting. That can mean chasing a bonus late into the night, waiting on a street corner for the next order, or worrying that one bad rating could cost you the next day’s pay.
And they’re right to be concerned. Two-thirds of gig workers in our survey said they worry that customer ratings reflect bias based on race, gender, or language. Those ratings directly affect earnings, the jobs they’re offered, and even whether they can keep working at all.
In other words, bias doesn’t just shape how workers are managed, it shapes how much they earn.
For Black workers in particular, this is not a new story. We’ve long seen how discrimination operates in hiring, wages, and workplace discipline. What’s new is that this power is built into apps and systems that workers can’t easily see or challenge.
At the same time, gig workers are dealing with high levels of financial insecurity. Compared to other workers, they are more likely to be in debt, more likely to struggle to make ends meet, and less likely to be able to cover even a $400 emergency expense.
That combination—financial pressure and control by the app—is what makes this moment so urgent.
The good news is that New York City has already started to act.
In recent years, the city has set minimum pay standards for app-based delivery workers, as well as new protections when workers are removed from the app, requiring companies to give notice and a reason before cutting off someone’s access to work. These are significant steps forward.
The opening of the Deliveristas Hub down by City Hall is another important step forward. Built through years of organizing by Worker’s Justice Project and Los Deliveristas Unidos, the hub gives delivery workers a place to rest, recharge their e-bikes, learn about their rights, and connect with one another—something that’s been missing in a job where workers are often on their own and always moving. These gains reflect sustained organizing by workers themselves.
But the reality is that these policies are still limited, and they don’t yet address the core issue: how platforms use algorithms to control the work itself and the people doing it.
If gig work is going to remain a major part of New York’s economy—and all signs suggest that it will—then we need to set standards not just for wages, but for how decisions are made, how data is used, and how people are treated. A good start would be for policymakers to establish a statewide regulatory framework addressing algorithmic management that ensures that app-based systems governing pay, discipline, and access to work are subject to enforceable standards of transparency, fairness and accountability.
Right now, companies set the rules, enforce them through systems workers can’t see, and those rules hit hardest for workers already facing economic and racial inequality.
We’ve seen this kind of power before in jobs where Black and Latino workers have long been overrepresented. The tools have just changed.
David R. Jones, Esq., is President and CEO of the Community Service Society of New York (CSS), the leading voice on behalf of low-income New Yorkers for more than 175 years. The views expressed in this column are solely those of the writer. The Urban Agenda is available on CSS’s website: www.cssny.org.