Like many big cities, New York teems with delivery workers who bring takeout, groceries, and any number of other things to anyone with a cellphone. They work at all hours and in all conditions, often without job security, health insurance, or even access to safe restrooms. They are often hit by cars, assaulted, or robbed. Many of them are Indigenous people from Guatemala and Mexico who left home to escape violence and the impacts of climate change.
The worst impacts of that global crisis add to the risks those workers face.
“When the city is hit with with massive snowstorms, floodings, or the recent smoke fires, many deliveristas are the ones who are on the front lines doing this work and responding to the climate crisis in order to take care of New Yorkers,” said Ligia Guallpa, who is Kichwa and the co-founder and executive director of the Worker’s Justice Project and Los Deliveristas Unidos. The organization organizes app-based delivery workers and advocates on their behalf. “But the reality is that often they cannot even take care of themselves.”
A report released Monday says that exploitation is deeply embedded in the global food system, leaving many of the 1.4 billion people who produce, process, distribute, and deliver food poorly paid, inadequately protected, and vulnerable to abuse. Climate change and a global affordability crisis are intensifying those pressures, according to the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, or IPES-Food, an international food policy research organization.
Although the document does not specifically focus on Indigenous peoples, it finds that many of the forces driving that exploitation have roots in the colonialism, land dispossession, forced labor, and racialized labor systems that have long harmed Indigenous communities worldwide.
“Here we are in the United States, a country that’s founded on stealing land and the import of enslaved people to be able to make agriculture and agricultural labor possible and cheap,” said Raj Patel, an IPES-Food expert and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “And the legacy of that is still with us.”
The report notes that Indigenous peoples remain particularly vulnerable to displacement, and pressures from industrial agriculture and climate change that can undermine traditional livelihoods. For people who have been forced off their land and are disconnected from those livelihoods, exploitative, low-paying work is often the only option.
“If you put yourself in a situation of a woman who needs to feed her children, they can go to any extreme,” said Teresa Chemosop, who is Ogiek from Mount Elgon, Kenya, and the coordinator for the East Africa Indigenous Women-Led Assembly, which advocates for Indigenous women across the region.
Chemosop said that Indigenous workers face severe discrimination and abuse, such as being compared to baboons and not being given utensils to eat with while working. That’s on top of low wages and long, difficult hours.
Indigenous and intergenerational agricultural knowledge is routinely minimized or dismissed as “unskilled,” the report notes, obscuring valuable expertise and helping to justify lower wages. That knowledge, which often goes back millenia, includes skills like cultivating plant medicines and drought-resistant crops. The authors call for formally recognizing that expertise alongside broader efforts to strengthen worker rights and protections.
The people who keep the global food system running do far more than grow and harvest food. They distribute it to markets and restaurants, deliver it to homes and offices, and provide care work like cooking and feeding families, often in seasonal or subcontracted jobs. Between 60 and 80 percent of food workers are informally employed — a higher share than in any other industry — and they earn about half as much as those with conventional employment. About 30 percent of food system workers, or more than 400 million people, earn less than a living wage.
An estimated 2.1 million people in agriculture work under forced-labor conditions, the report estimates. Migrants, who account for about a quarter of all farmworkers worldwide, are three times as likely to experience such conditions and are more likely than their peers to die on the job.
Despite their importance in feeding the world, these workers do not receive the respect or protection other essential workers enjoy. Guallpa pointed to the pandemic, when nurses and doctors were widely praised even as food service workers remained largely anonymous. “Immigrant workers, who do some of the most dangerous, dirtiest jobs, often go unseen and often are invisibilized,” she said.
The report argues that valuing food work in all its forms, from the field to the table, is just one part of building a more just system. It also calls for building worker power, establishing and sustaining workplace protections, ensuring equal rights for migrant workers, and reining in corporate power. And it makes clear that there is a false choice between affordability and worker rights, arguing that better working conditions do not have to mean higher food prices.
“We can manage all of this, and we will have to manage all of this because climate change isn’t getting better,” Patel said. “But we have choices about protecting workers, and we’re choosing not to do any of those things.”
In New York, Los Deliveristas Unidos’ organizing provides a glimpse of what workers can accomplish. It has established mutual aid chat groups and helped win minimum wages and other protections. “It is possible to give gig workers or independent contractors the ability to earn better pay, to ensure that workers have better working conditions. It is possible to regulate multi-billion-dollar corporations,” Guallpa said. “There’s a lot more to do, but I think it can be applied in every city.”
