Los Deliveristas Unidos

Los Deliveristas Unidos (LDU) is a New York City collective of approximately 65,000 app-based food and grocery delivery workers — overwhelmingly migrant, over 90 percent people of colour and immigrants from Latin America, South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean — organising against the major delivery-app platforms (DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub, Relay, Instacart) under the auspices of the Brooklyn-based Workers Justice Project (WJP). LDU is the corpus's first US grassroots local-group anchored on gig-worker organising against platform algorithmic management, and the first to have translated that organising into operational US municipal law: the September 23, 2021 NYC City Council package of delivery-worker protections (Local Laws of 2021), the first-of-its-kind US municipal minimum-pay ordinance for app-based delivery workers ($17.96 per hour plus tips, implemented November 2023), and the standing 2025–2026 campaign for Intro 1332, the proposed just-cause deactivation bill that would require app companies to give written reasons before locking workers out of their accounts.

LDU's centre of gravity is the migrant-Latin-American and indigenous-Mesoamerican workforce that powers the NYC delivery economy. Co-founder Gustavo Ajche — K'iche' Mayan, who arrived in NYC from Guatemala as a teenager in 2004 and found his first job as a pizza delivery worker — and co-founder Jonán Huerta, Zapotec from Mexico City, anchor the organising form on the indigenous-Mexican / Central-American kinship and language networks through which the delivery workforce moved during the early-pandemic surge in app-based delivery demand. Workers Justice Project Executive Director and co-founder Ligia M. Guallpa — born in Ecuador, immigrated at age ten — carries the LDU policy and litigation programme at the NYC City Council, the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, and the platform companies. Hildalyn Colón Hernández serves as Director of Policy and Strategic Partnerships at WJP / LDU.

Founding and pandemic-era growth (2020–2021)

LDU's organising substrate predates the formal collective. Through the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, delivery workers gathered in public parks and built mutual-aid WhatsApp groups as restaurant work shuttered and app-based delivery demand surged. The collective's name and Facebook-group infrastructure emerged from delivery workers on the Relay platform organising alongside the adjacent Facebook groups Aztecas En Dos Ruedas and El Diario de los Deliveryboys en la Gran Manzana and quickly extended beyond the Relay base. The collective consolidated into LDU and formally joined the Workers Justice Project, which supplied the Brooklyn-based worker-centre infrastructure (organising staff, legal guidance, fiscal apparatus, research partnerships) under which the LDU programme has run since.

LDU's first major public action came on October 15, 2020, when over 600 couriers — flying flags from Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, and Honduras — biked down Broadway to City Hall denouncing workplace abuse and wage theft. The collective's organising scale grew through the winter and spring of 2020–2021 alongside an escalating pattern of robberies, assaults, and the murder of delivery worker Francisco Villalba Vitino; by April 21, 2021 more than 2,000 delivery workers biked from Times Square to Foley Square, briefly shutting down Broadway, in the largest delivery-worker mobilisation NYC had seen. The April 2021 mobilisation also marked LDU's strategic alliance with 32BJ SEIU, the city's largest service-workers union, which had used its political capital and organising capacity to support LDU's path toward NYC legislative recognition — a structurally important pairing because the gig-worker / independent-contractor classification on which the delivery platforms rest precludes the standard collective-bargaining route, leaving the city's most powerful labour vehicle to back LDU's organising through legislative and political channels rather than through formal union membership.

The September 2021 NYC Local Laws package

LDU's first major legislative outcome was the September 23, 2021 NYC City Council passage of a six-bill delivery-worker package — sponsored by Councilmembers Carlina Rivera, Brad Lander, Justin Brannan, and Margaret Chin — that established the first US municipal-law framework specifically governing app-based delivery work. The package's substantive content covered five named regulatory areas:

• Restroom access at the restaurants delivery workers pick up from (Local Law 117 of 2021) — the most-cited frontline demand, addressing the long-running pattern of restaurants refusing delivery couriers access to bathrooms.
• Weekly pay and a prohibition on charging workers for the payment of their wages (Local Law 116 of 2021) — ending the practice of platforms charging workers fees to collect their own earnings.
• A mandate to the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection to study delivery-worker pay and set a minimum-payment methodology (Local Law 115 of 2021) — the statutory hook on which the 2023 minimum-pay rule below was built.
• Licensing-suspension authority for DCWP (Local Law 113 of 2021) over food-delivery applications that twice violate delivery-worker-protection provisions inside two years.
• App-transparency requirements including tips, delivery routes, and the option for workers to cap maximum trip distance per order.

The 2021 package's significance is that it operates on the platforms qua platforms rather than on the workers' employment classification — leaving the independent-contractor status of delivery workers untouched while imposing platform-side obligations enforceable by the city through DCWP. That strategic move is the legislative-side counterpart to LDU's reading that the path to enforceable platform-worker rights in the US near term runs through municipal regulatory law rather than through National Labor Relations Act recognition.

Minimum-pay implementation (2023–)

The 2021 package's downstream artefact, and LDU's signature post-2021 win, is the DCWP minimum-pay rule of $17.96 per hour plus tips that took effect November 2023. The rule's promulgation under Local Law 115 of 2021 made NYC the first US municipality to set a binding minimum hourly pay floor for app-based delivery workers, and the delivery platforms' lawsuit against the rule delayed its original June 2023 effective date by five months before being unsuccessful in halting implementation. LDU organised the parallel Customers Delivering Justice campaign in summer 2023, which generated over 1,600 customer letters to the city in support of full minimum-pay implementation and that supplied the public-mobilisation counterweight to the platforms' lobbying during the DCWP rulemaking.

The post-implementation period has surfaced the platforms' algorithmic and pay-structure responses to the new rule. In 2026 DCWP published a report finding that Uber and DoorDash drove $550 million in delivery-worker pay losses through tip-flow restructuring and the imposition of new fees and offer-frequency reductions that effectively recovered the platforms' minimum-pay costs from worker income elsewhere — a documented platform response that LDU has organised against and that supplied the empirical predicate for the Mamdani administration's January 2026 announcement of a $5 million settlement with delivery platforms over cheated deliveristas pay and for its zero-tolerance enforcement posture on the LDU-organised delivery-worker protections.

Algorithmic management and the deactivation campaign (2024–)

LDU's standing 2025–2026 campaign is against platform-side algorithmic management and, specifically, the algorithmic-deactivation practices through which the platforms terminate delivery workers without notice or appeal. The campaign's working analytical frame — set out by LDU in public testimony and press coverage — is that app delivery companies have outsourced their termination processes to AI "algorithmic management" programs that fire workers against impossible deadlines and from which workers have no practical appeal. By LDU's own count, in a single four-month window in 2025 the organisation filed over a thousand deactivation appeals with Grubhub, DoorDash, and Uber on behalf of suddenly-locked-out workers, including the documented case of Grubhub courier Cossi Azonwakon, deactivated in March 2025 after six years on the platform with no prior discipline.

The campaign's legislative vehicle is Intro 1332, introduced in the NYC City Council by Brooklyn Council Member Justin Brannan in July 2025, which would require written notice of the reason for any deactivation (after a 30-day probation period), permit deactivations only for just cause or a bona-fide economic reason, mandate prior disciplinary action before termination, cover both permanent deactivations and temporary lockouts restricting platform access, and place enforcement with DCWP across Instacart, Grubhub, DoorDash, and UberEats. Brannan's framing of the algorithmic-management category at the bill's introduction — that "the worker experience of this algorithmic management is like this invisible robot boss who you can't talk to" — supplies the bill's public-facing analytical anchor and traces directly to LDU's own organising vocabulary. The bill received its City Council hearing on September 12, 2025 followed by an October 10, 2025 Lower Manhattan rally and is, as of 2026, the central legislative project of LDU's standing campaign.

The campaign's adjacent flashpoint is the broader question of platform-algorithm tempo. When DoorDash publicly endorsed NYC's 15 mph e-bike speed limit in October 2025 but declined to commit to corresponding algorithmic adjustments giving delivery workers additional time to complete orders, Guallpa characterised the company's stance as hypocritical — naming the algorithmic-tempo apparatus rather than the e-bike rider as the source of the speed pressure the city's safety regime is responding to. The exchange is a representative miniature of the broader campaign: the platforms' public-policy positioning and their algorithmic-management practices are routinely structurally inconsistent, and LDU's organising work in 2025–2026 has been to make that inconsistency legislatively actionable.

Place in the movement

Within the corpus, LDU sits at the intersection of three strands that the movement-graph tracks separately elsewhere:

• The algorithmic-management organising thread, anchored analytically by the msg-algorithmic-management framing that travels from Carnegie Mellon HCI research (2015), through Data & Society-adjacent civil-society research (2019), through the UK / Amsterdam Worker Info Exchange and ADCU litigation arc (2021–2023), through the Philippine BPO and platform-worker organising of CODE-AI (2025–), and into the EU's Platform Work Directive 2024/2831. LDU is the corpus's first US municipal-scale gig-worker local-group inside this thread, and the first to have translated the algorithmic-management framing into operational US municipal legislation.
• The gig-worker / platform-labour organising thread, where the corpus has, on the worker-protection legislative side, the WIE / ADCU UK and Amsterdam litigation lineage, and on the broader labour-and-AI thread, the WGA / SAG-AFTRA 2023 contractual provisions on generative-AI use. LDU supplies the US end of the platform-labour spectrum and is the corpus's clearest case study of a migrant-led, indigenous-Mesoamerican worker collective successfully running a municipal legislative campaign against algorithmic-management practices in the absence of formal union membership.
• The migrant-worker / immigrant-rights organising thread, where LDU's organisational form — a kinship- and language-network-anchored migrant worker collective housed inside a Brooklyn worker centre, allied with but not part of the established labour union infrastructure — is the form likeliest to surface in the next phase of US grassroots organising on AI-mediated work, and the form the corpus needs to be able to recognise as the gig-worker landscape continues to expand into adjacent migrant-heavy sectors (home care, warehouse logistics, ride-hail).

LDU's three-fold positioning — as algorithmic-management organisers, as platform-labour organisers, and as a migrant-worker collective — closes a structural gap the corpus carried until this entry: prior coverage of US worker organising on AI was anchored on the established craft-union case (WGA / SAG-AFTRA's 2023 generative-AI provisions) and on the African content-moderator and tech-worker organising lineage (Daniel Motaung and the African Content Moderators Union; the Africa Tech Workers Movement; the Data Labellers Association; the Kenyan Tech Workers open letter to President Biden), with no entity capturing the US gig-worker register and no entity capturing migrant-led organising against algorithmic management at the city scale. LDU fills both gaps simultaneously, and its 2021 NYC Local Laws package and 2023 minimum-pay ordinance — paired with the 2025–2026 Intro 1332 deactivation campaign and the Mamdani-administration enforcement posture — make it the corpus's strongest operational-legislative case study to date of grassroots organising against algorithmic management successfully translating into binding US municipal law.