Andy Newman

Even as it faced blistering criticism for the policy in February, DoorDash stuck with it.

No longer. DoorDash announced Tuesday night that it was dropping its tipping policy, which had effectively meant customers’ tips were going to DoorDash rather than the person who delivered their meal.

The decision followed another round of outrage and customer complaints about the policy after a New York Times reporter described in an article what it was like to work as a food-app deliveryman.

DoorDash’s reversal comes amid a broader debate about jobs and fair pay in the so-called gig economy, where workers have more flexibility but less stability and fewer benefits.

“Going forward,” DoorDash’s chief executive, Tony Xu, wrote on Twitter on Tuesday, “we’re changing our model — the new model will ensure that Dashers’ earnings will increase by the exact amount a customer tips on every order. We’ll have specific details in the coming days.”

For DoorDash’s 400,000 delivery workers, known as Dashers, the “specific details” hold the key to whether the decision actually increases the money that goes in their pockets.

Under the policy, which the company adopted in 2017, DoorDash began offering a guaranteed minimum payment for a delivery.

A tip paid through the app now went mostly to offsetting DoorDash’s contribution toward the guarantee, rather than increasing the Dasher’s pay.

DoorDash had said the system kept workers’ pay consistent when customers tipped little or nothing. For example, if DoorDash guaranteed a worker $7 for a delivery and a customer did not tip, DoorDash would directly pay the worker $7.

But if the customer tipped $3 via the app, DoorDash would directly pay the worker only $4, then add on the $3 tip so that the worker would still get only $7.

While the announcement is good news for customers who would like to think that their tips are going to increase a worker’s earnings, the implications are much less clear for the Dashers themselves.

On a forum for DoorDash workers on Reddit, some Dashers greeted the news with concern that DoorDash would simply pay them less to make up for the revenue it expected to lose after no longer being able to subsidize labor costs with tips.

“I’m worried that the orders will guarantee less now, but we get all the tips,” wrote a Reddit user named Dmillz648. “Meaning a previously guaranteed 10-dollar order might now only guarantee 5 bucks, and you get a 2 dollar tip, meaning you got 7 bucks for that order.”

“That’s my worry too,” replied a user named williams91. “And it saved me in times that I’ve been stiffed, so we’ll have to see the model. I’m nervous but excited.” A DoorDash spokeswoman did not immediately comment on whether the company would change its payouts to workers.

DoorDash, which was valued at $7.1 billion after a round of financing this year, has faced bad publicity about its tipping policy before.

In February, Instacart, a grocery delivery app, dropped a similar tipping policy in the wake of a shaming campaign, and DoorDash was pressured to follow suit.

At the time, Xu stood firm. “This is a model that is built with Dashers in mind,” he said then. “The pay model is meant to make sure every order is worth fulfilling.”

But after The Times published an article on Sunday about what it was like working for DoorDash and other food apps, the blowback reignited on social media.

Thousands of people blasted the company. Some swore they would tip Dashers only in cash from now on. Others said they had deleted the app altogether.

“I don’t believe that a single person intends to give a tip to a multibillion dollar venture-backed startup,” a tech journalist, Louise Matsakis, wrote in a tweet that was retweeted thousands of times. “They are trying to tip the person who delivered their order. This deceptive model should be illegal.”

All the other major delivery apps give workers 100% of tips, but their pay rates vary. In this reporter’s very brief experience as a food delivery worker for multiple apps earlier this year, I typically made more on DoorDash orders than on orders for Uber Eats or Postmates.

For Instacart workers, that company’s decision to scrap its unpopular tip policy has had mixed results. Some workers say that their pay has fallen.

In his Twitter thread on Tuesday, Xu wrote that DoorDash’s average contribution to Dashers did not change after it adopted the tipping policy it is now dropping. Before adopting that policy, the company had paid workers a flat fee per delivery, plus any tip from the customer.

DoorDash says that in its recent surveys of Dashers, they overwhelmingly preferred the current system to the flat-fee model.

“But it’s clear from recent feedback that we didn’t strike the right balance. We thought we were doing the right thing by making Dashers whole when a customer left no tip,” Xu wrote. DoorDash says customers do not tip 15% of the time.

“What we missed was that some customers who did tip would feel like their tip did not matter.”

Counting tips toward a worker’s wages is not a technique invented by tech companies. It is borrowed from the restaurant industry concept of a “tipped wage.” But restaurant employees are covered by minimum-wage laws and laws that limit the amount of tips that can be counted toward those wages.

In New York City, for example, restaurants are allowed to count up to $5 per hour of a worker’s tips toward the minimum wage, which ranges from $13.50 to $15 per hour.

There is no such thing as minimum wage in the piecework world of on-demand delivery.

Because delivery workers for apps are legally considered independent contractors, not employees — they set their own hours and can accept or reject any job, though they have no ability to negotiate rates — they have no wage protections.

But across the country, legislators and workers’ advocates are pushing for change.

The California Senate is considering a bill that would reclassify hundreds of thousands of gig-economy workers as employees. It is opposed by Uber and Lyft, the ride-hailing giants.

In New York, a city councilman, Brad Lander, said on Tuesday that he was working to create a living-wage requirement for delivery workers, but warned that it would be complicated.

In Madison Square Park in Manhattan on Wednesday afternoon, Courtney Melton, a food delivery worker, said she was still trying to figure out what the news might mean.

Whatever changes DoorDash makes, she said, “they’re going to put themselves first; that’s what a business does.”

Melton, 31, has worked for almost all the food delivery apps and said that she wished DoorDash had been more transparent about its tip policy.

“That’s why they got so much backlash,” she said. “All they had to do was be upfront. Just tell the consumer.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/nyregion/doordash-tip-policy.html" id="384a36da-9881-30d2-ac3d-f63d820983a0">The New York Times</a>.

DoorDash Changes Tipping Model After Uproar From Customers

As DoorDash grew to become the biggest on-demand food delivery app in the country, it began doing something unconventional with customers’ tips: It used them mostly to subsidize its payments to delivery workers.

The decision follows days of widespread outrage and angry customer complaints about the policy after a New York Times reporter described in an article what it was like to work as a deliveryman for the company.

“Going forward,” DoorDash’s chief executive, Tony Xu, wrote on Twitter on Tuesday night, “we’re changing our model — the new model will ensure that Dashers’ earnings will increase by the exact amount a customer tips on every order. We’ll have specific details in the coming days.”

Under the policy, which the company adopted in 2017, DoorDash would offer a Dasher a guaranteed minimum amount to do a delivery. If a customer tipped, in most cases a tip paid through the app would go to subsidizing DoorDash’s contribution toward the guarantee, rather than increasing the Dasher’s pay.

For example, if DoorDash guaranteed a worker $7 for a delivery and a customer did not tip, DoorDash would directly pay the worker $7. If the customer tipped $3 via the app, DoorDash would directly pay the worker only $4, then add on the $3 tip so that the worker would still get only $7.

There is no such thing as minimum wage in the piecework world of on-demand delivery. Also, the apps frequently adjust their complex pay models, which include incentives for working during rush periods and volume bonuses for doing a certain number of deliveries in a set time.

On a forum for DoorDash workers on Reddit, some Dashers greeted the news with concern that DoorDash would simply pay them less to make up for the revenue it would lose by not using tips to subsidize labor costs.

“That’s my worry too,” replied a user named williams91. “And it saved me in times that I’ve been stiffed, so we’ll have to see the model. I’m nervous but excited.”

During the lunch rush on Park Avenue in Manhattan on Wednesday, a Dasher named Muhammed Condeh said he hoped DoorDash did not lower payouts.

“That would not be fair to us,” said Condeh, 22, a student from Minnesota who comes to New York in the summers to work. “That would not make any sense.”

A DoorDash spokeswoman did not immediately comment on whether the company would change its payouts to workers.

DoorDash, which was valued at $7.1 billion after a round of financing this year, has faced bad publicity about its policy before.

But after The Times published an article Sunday by a reporter who spent days working as a deliveryman for DoorDash and other food apps, the blowback reignited on social media.

Thousands of people blasted the company, swore they would tip DoorDash workers only in cash or said they had deleted the app altogether.

All the other major delivery apps, including GrubHub and Uber Eats, give workers 100% of tips, but their base pay rates vary.

When this reporter rode for DoorDash, Uber Eats and Postmates this spring, DoorDash’s guaranteed minimum payouts were typically higher than the payouts of Uber Eats and Postmates, which lets workers keep the tip.

On one DoorDash order I wrote about, the guaranteed minimum was $6.85, and that was what I got paid even though the customer tipped $3 via the app.

But it was a short delivery — only about six blocks — and I would have been paid only $3 or $4 for doing the same delivery for Uber Eats or Postmates under those apps’ compensation and minimum-payment policies.

In his Twitter thread Tuesday, Xu wrote that under the model that was being dropped, DoorDash’s average contribution to Dashers was the same as it had been under the pre-2017 model. Before 2017, DoorDash paid Dashers a flat fee per delivery, plus any tip from the customer.

“But it’s clear from recent feedback that we didn’t strike the right balance. We thought we were doing the right thing by making Dashers whole when a customer left no tip,” he wrote. DoorDash says customers do not tip 15% of the time.

But across the country, legislators and advocates for workers are pushing for change.

The California Senate is considering a bill that would reclassify hundreds of thousands of gig-economy workers as employees. It is being opposed by Uber and Lyft, the ride-hailing giants.

In New York, a city councilman, Brad Lander, said on Tuesday that he was working to create a living-wage requirement for delivery workers.

“We can say by law that they must pay people a living wage, but calculating what that means and how to enforce it is complicated,” Lander said. “That’s what we’re working on.”

DoorDash Changes Tipping Model After Uproar

DoorDash, the nation’s biggest on-demand food-delivery app, is dropping a widely criticized tipping policy that effectively meant customers’ tips were going to DoorDash rather than the worker who delivered their meal.

But after The Times published an article on Sunday by a reporter who spent days working as a deliveryman for DoorDash and other food apps, the blowback reignited on social media.

DoorDash’s 400,000 delivery workers are known as Dashers.

Seconds later my phone ponged — different sound. Postmates, another delivery app: Pick up two orders at Shake Shack on Broadway and 36th?

I had to decide: Take on three orders at once and risk falling behind? Stick with Uber Eats, which was running a $10 bonus for doing six deliveries by 1:30, or try for a Postmates bonus?

Information was limited. The Uber Eats app doesn’t tell you where the delivery is going until you pick it up. I could not know what the Postmates job would pay.

The Postmates clock ticked down — you have seconds to accept or decline an order. I was threading my way around lurching honking trucks and oblivious texting pedestrians and watching for cops and looking down at the phone mounted on my handlebars and calculating delivery times.

The riders, once you’re tuned in to them, are everywhere, gliding by stoically, usually on electric bikes, wearing their precious cargo on their backs: the silent swarm of tens of thousands of workers for apps like Seamless and GrubHub and Uber Eats and Caviar and DoorDash and Postmates, crisscrossing the city to gratify New Yorkers’ insatiable need for burgers and pad thai and chicken tikka masala delivered in minutes.

For a few days this spring, I was one of them. Not a good one, but a deliveryman nevertheless. I learned up close how the high-tech era of on-demand everything is transforming some of the lowest-tech, lowest-status, low-wage occupations — creating both new opportunities and new forms of exploitation.

The riders are the street-level manifestation of an overturned industry, as restaurants are forced to become e-commerce businesses, outsourcing delivery to the apps who outsource it to freelancers.

Mindless as the job may seem, it is often like a game of real-life speed chess played across the treacherous grid of the city, as riders juggle orders from competing apps and scramble for elusive bonuses.

And there are risks. Nearly a third of delivery cyclists missed work because of on-the-job injuries last year, one survey found, and at least four delivery riders or bike messengers have been killed in crashes with cars this year. Riders on electric bikes face fines and confiscation, though that may change.

Maria Figueroa, director of labor and policy research for the Cornell University Worker Institute in Manhattan, called the food couriers “the most vulnerable workers in digital labor.”

“People think digital economy or the future of work, we’re all going to be these hipsters sitting by their computers or driving these luxury cars,” she said. “That’s not the case with these guys.”

The riders have much in common with their overworked gig-economy cousins who drive for Uber and Lyft. But while ride-hail drivers successfully lobbied the city for a $17 minimum wage, most delivery-app couriers are not guaranteed a cent.

Even their tips have a way of vanishing: One app subtracts the amount the customer tips from the amount it pays the courier — effectively pocketing the tip.

“The whole thing is like gambling,” said Werner Zhanay, 23, who delivers for Postmates and Caviar. “You have to be at a spot. You have to hope that there are orders there and then — do you stay at that spot?”

Delivering restaurant food has always been a hard job. With the apps, it is becoming more flexible and better paying — but in some ways less stable.

This, said Niels van Doorn, an assistant professor of new media and digital culture at the University of Amsterdam who spent six months in New York studying app riders last year, “is what happens with an already precarious workforce — what happens to an already invisibilized workforce — when these platforms come to town.”

My own 27 hours on a borrowed electric bike, alternately hellbent and ping-starved as I navigated chaotic streets and clattering restaurant kitchens and sleek apartment towers, were an immersion in the paradoxes and perils of a job in which making more than minimum wage requires the physical daring of a bullfighter and the cognitive reflexes of a day trader.

I tasted the thrill of a decent tip and the agony of accepting a blind order that took me 40 blocks uptown to deliver two bagels. And I learned what can happen if you pay attention to the traffic for a whole minute or fail to hear your phone over the sirens and jackhammers: Miss one ping and there goes your Uber Eats Quest bonus.

My brief delivery career began in a concrete-floored office in industrial East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. There were eight of us in plastic chairs, onboarding for DoorDash, the country’s leading food-delivery app. A man named Michael in a red DoorDash hoodie put up a map of a city showing red zones, hot spots and bonus zones.

“This map is always changing, always changing, always changing, it never stops changing,” Michael said.

In a few minutes, he was done: “Good luck, welcome to DoorDash, and if you make a lot of money, bring me some.”

People filed in for the next orientation — they were held every hour, making the place feel like a gold-rush town. Jobs for everyone!

At the dawn of the food-app era, back in 2016 or so, companies awash in venture capital paid fat wages with hourly guarantees and some riders made $2,000 a week.

“With Postmates you’d average $10 a job,” said Rodney Chadwick, a courier since 2016. “They’d have a Blitz and the Blitz would be like $15 a job, sometimes $20.”

As more riders signed up, supply met demand and the apps’ generosity evaporated. By 2017, Chadwick said, Postmates paid $4 or $5 a job. Riders usually do two or three orders an hour.

The riders I talked to average hourly wages in the midteens with tips, though I met a couple of Jedi Masters who cleared over $20. My rookie earnings added up to just under $10 an hour — $5 below the city’s minimum wage. (I’m donating them to The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, which supports social-service nonprofits in the city.)

Postmates says its couriers in New York City average $18.50 an hour. But it counts only the time when a courier is out on an order as part of that hour. The long stretches I spent staring at my silent phone like a jilted boyfriend, waiting for it to ping? Not part of my workday, according to Postmates.

The apps roll out ever-changing and often confusing menus of bonuses and incentives borrowed from the video-game and slot-machine industries, engineered to convince riders that they may yet win as long as they keep playing. But with so many riders chasing the same prizes, they often fall short.

Also, the apps keep ratcheting down base pay so that even when a rider earns a bonus, “You’re basically paying the bonus out of your own pocket,” van Doorn said.

In May, Postmates got rid of its guaranteed minimum of $4 per order. A company official said the change was intended to discourage riders from rejecting longer trips, and that it had not affected workers’ earnings. But on a Facebook group for Postmates couriers in New York, the move was greeted with outrage. One courier wrote that she made $5.05 for doing two deliveries from 96th Street to 145th Street in Manhattan. “I’m done with PM,” she wrote.

Van Doorn interviewed dozens of riders and found that about three-quarters were riding for multiple apps, often simultaneously, to boost their earnings.

Couriers who ride for the apps are mostly distinct from those who work directly for a restaurant. The latter — a whole other army of tens of thousands — are more likely to be without legal status to work, and though they’re entitled to at least $11.25 an hour plus tips, most are paid only a fraction of that.

It is no surprise, then, that many app riders are escapees from restaurant work. “I would never go back to delivering for restaurants,” said Mengba Lee, 58, a Chinese immigrant who makes about $14 an hour riding for Caviar and Postmates.

Bahadir Rozi, a 29-year-old from Uzbekistan, uses the downtime between lunch and dinner to study acting and write — impossible if he were still pulling 12-hour restaurant shifts. “The best thing about this job is freedom,” he said.

Andrew Iroham, 49, worked in restaurants and construction for decades after arriving from Nigeria. Now he rides for Caviar, GrubHub, Uber Eats and Relay. “This job is like working for nobody,” he said. “It’s like having a boss but not having a boss.”

With some apps, getting approved to ride is as easy as uploading ID, passing a background check and hitting “Go” on your phone — no human interaction necessary.

It was nice not having to answer to a live person as I made my rounds. But taking orders from an all-seeing robot overlord could be eerie. “We’ve noticed you are heading in the wrong direction,” read a message from Postmates one day as I detoured for an Uber Eats order.

My interactions with customers were minimal, too. In fancy new apartment buildings and airy offices, young professional-looking people opened their doors just long enough to grab the food and mouth thanks.

This is the frictionless economy we’ve become reliant on: Tap your phone five times and a peanut-butter açaí bowl appears at your door. The only task left for human laborers is the physical transfer of goods.

Whether a courier rides for an app or a restaurant, some occupational hazards remain the same. “In 2016, I was riding for Postmates and I broke both my arms,” said a former Postmates courier, Mike Cole. “They sent me a get-well-soon card via email.” (Some apps offer free accident insurance coverage.)

Delivery riders have long faced another peril: The throttle-controlled electric bikes they favor are not street-legal in New York, and police have confiscated thousands of them. Though the bikes have been demonized as a menace to pedestrians — including by Mayor Bill de Blasio — e-bikes were involved in, at most, 0.3% of crashes that injured pedestrians last year, according to an analysis by an advocacy group called the Biking Public Project.

Last month, though, the state Legislature voted to legalize the bikes. Gov. Andrew Cuomo has not signed the bill yet, saying it needs “more review and discussion.”

All day long, while dodging taxi doors or battling buses for a sliver of asphalt, a delivery person thinks about time and money. How long will this order take? What will it pay? Whenever something goes wrong, it’s usually the rider’s problem.

A deliveryman in the West Village showed me screenshots of a 23-minute wait at a restaurant for which Caviar compensated him all of 83 cents. When I was dispatched to an ice cream store in Times Square that turned out to be closed, Postmates paid me 61 cents for my wasted time, then took it back. “Payout has been adjusted following your request to cancel the delivery,” the note read.

On my first DoorDash shift, a lunch run in Brooklyn, I learned about the company’s interesting tipping policy.

DoorDash offers a guaranteed minimum for each job. For my first order, the guarantee was $6.85 and the customer, a woman in Boerum Hill who answered the door in a colorful bathrobe, tipped $3 via the app. But I still received only $6.85.

Here’s how it works: If the woman in the bathrobe had tipped zero, DoorDash would have paid me the whole $6.85. Because she tipped $3, DoorDash kicked in only $3.85. She was saving DoorDash $3, not tipping me.

A DoorDash spokeswoman said that in recent surveys, Dashers said they overwhelmingly preferred this model to an old one that paid a flat fee per order. (I did typically earn more on orders for DoorDash than for Uber Eats and Postmates.)

The policy has attracted the attention of city lawmakers, though. Councilman Ritchie Torres of the Bronx wants to require apps to tell customers whether tips go to the worker or the company. Recently, DoorDash started listing this information in the fine print on its website.

My last day as a food courier began with an order on the East Side that included the notation “Happy Birthday” next to the recipient’s name. I sang “Happy Birthday” as I proffered her egg sandwich. “Oh, thank you!” she said, laughing. (Tip: zero.)

It ended 41 miles later in Brooklyn after a failed attempt at a four-delivery sprint that included an order getting taken away from me and assigned to another courier because I was late. “It’s all good,” the last customer said, meaning it wasn’t, as I handed over his lukewarm chicken fingers.

In between came a lunch delivery to a Class A office building in Midtown. I was sent to a service entrance where a fellow deliveryman led me down a dumpster-lined corridor to a crammed holding pen where couriers huddled in near-silence, food packs on their backs.

I had stumbled through a dystopian portal. I thought of what a colleague had said the day before: “You’re one step above an Amazon drone.” I thought of something van Doorn had said, that the couriers’ real value to the app companies is in the data harvested like pollen as we make our rounds — data that will allow them to eventually replace us with machines.

One by one, office workers approached a window in the wall to claim their lunches. I handed my customer a sandwich from a restaurant a mile’s ride away.

“Thank you,” she said brightly. “Have a nice day!”

She did not tip. I filed out of the corral and hopped back on my bike.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/20/nyregion/doordash-ubereats-food-app-delivery-bike.html" id="08bc5c6a-996a-322d-a067-4364f00e69b9">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — I had just started my lunch shift when the phone pinged: Uber Eats, pickup at Cocina del Sur on West 38th Street in Manhattan, five blocks away. Great! I pedaled down West 40th into congealing crosstown traffic.

Dodging Cabs, Chasing Tips and Juggling Orders: Life as a Food App Delivery Guy

Their bodies were found beside their capsized rowboat by another fisherman who came to the Muscoot Reservoir around 7 a.m., said Capt. David Atkins of the state police.

The men, Ngan Kong, 48, of Brooklyn; and Ma Weitao, 47, of Staten Island, had gone fishing on the reservoir, in Goldens Bridge about 30 miles north of New York City, on Monday night, Atkins said.

“They did speak to family members about 5 p.m. yesterday to say that they wanted to keep fishing later into the night,” Atkins said.

Muscoot Reservoir snakes for 8 miles through northern Westchester County. It is part of the city’s water supply system and is a popular spot for trout and bass fishing.

It was not clear if the unsettled weather overnight played a role. There were wind gusts over 20 mph and heavy rain in the area Monday night.

Police searched the reservoir with divers and found no other victims, nor any sign of foul play.

“There’s nothing suspicious in nature, and it was nothing more than an accidental drowning,” Atkins said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/01/nyregion/fisherman-dead-westchester-boat.html" id="00f9b138-d0a1-3d06-a069-cab9cde60ed6">The New York Times</a>.

Two friends from New York City were found dead in a reservoir in Westchester County early New Year’s Day after their fishing boat overturned, authorities said.

2 Fishermen Die After Boat Capsizes on Westchester Reservoir

“You’re home, Bob. This is your home,” Marjorie told him. She calmed him down, cleaned him off, showered him, dressed him and put him back to bed, but could not get herself back to sleep.

Now it was deep into a dreary Wednesday morning. Marjorie set out a bowl of Cheerios, a plate of strawberry and apricot slices in a star pattern, milk, juice and a plastic shot glass with six pills in it — blue, white, brown.

“Where are you, Bob?” she called. “Come in and have breakfast, finish your food, your cereal, then you have your medications.”

This was in late May, but it could have been pretty much any time this year. Since mid-January, Marjorie has been Bob Dettmer’s round-the-clock caretaker. Bob is fogged in by Alzheimer’s and unsteady from Parkinson’s. Marjorie’s job is called home health aide, but the term does not begin to encompass her duties. She is social worker, housekeeper, behavioral-modification expert, dietitian, diaper changer, day planner, de facto case manager, warden and more.

Marjorie agreed to do the job for a flat rate of $160 per day plus room and board. Her workday starts when Bob wakes up, or before, and finishes after he goes to sleep, and can stretch for 14 or 16 hours or more. She works 26 or 27 days out of the month. The pay is not much — at 16 hours a day, it would come to $10 an hour — but Bob’s family is deeply grateful, and that counts for a lot.

“If I take a client and I have the respect,” she said, “I will stay through to the end.”

Home health care is the fastest growing major job category in the country, one of the most emotionally and personally demanding, and one of the worst paid.

Elder-boomers living longer and seeking to “age in place” rather than in institutions have created a demographic explosion that even a 150% increase in home care workers in the last decade, to nearly 2.3 million, cannot keep pace with. Nationwide, hundreds of thousands of ailing people entitled to Medicaid-funded home care are on waiting lists.

But home care workers’ labor happens behind closed doors. The workers are mostly women of color, and about one-third are immigrants. As a result, many advocates say, their work is systematically and systemically devalued, dismissed as “domestic care” and reimbursed at rock-bottom rates by state Medicaid programs.

It is a vicious circle. Because these have always been poor-paying jobs, they are seen as lousy, low-skill jobs. And because they are seen as lousy, low-skill jobs, they pay poorly.

“Rather than calling them low-wage workers, I would call these workers professionals who are paid low wages,” said Robyn Stone, senior vice president for research at LeadingAge, an association of nonprofit aging-services providers.

“They are taking care of people with very complex needs, people who have multiple chronic conditions, who may have all kinds of varied living environments. A lot of the families are really dysfunctional and the aides have to deal with that, too. And they’re getting paid chump change, and it’s a travesty.”

Nationwide, home care workers — a category that includes home health aides as well as home care aides and personal care aides, who have less specialized training — average $11.52 an hour, and 45% of them who work full time are on public assistance, according to PHI, a research and consulting group focused on direct care workers.

In the New York region, inflation-adjusted wages for home health aides actually fell from 2007 to 2017. In New York, one of the most expensive cities in the country, the 91,000 full-time home care aides earned an average of $27,000 in 2017, according to the city Department of Consumer and Worker Protection.

The turnover rate, not surprisingly, is astronomical. As many as two-thirds of home care workers leave their jobs, their field or the workforce every year, and more than 4.2 million jobs will have to be filled from 2016 to 2026, PHI says.

Twenty-four-hour care is particularly grueling and isolating: long bouts of idleness, punctuated by spasms of disorder and intimate struggle. Home care workers are typically offered little support or counseling on how to deal with the stress or process the grief.

“All they tell you is, ‘Don’t get attached to the client,’” Marjorie said. “But how do you prevent that? If you have a heart, how can you not get attached?”

In some ways, taking care of an Alzheimer’s patient is like parenting a 170-pound toddler. In some ways, it is like being married to one.

Yet many aides who stick with the job consider it a calling.

“This job, it is total, it is total demand,” Marjorie said one day. “Sometimes they don’t pay you what they should, but you know what, I don’t know what the end of my time is going to be like. I believe that what goes around comes around, and I believe in distributing love equally and fairly.”

Bob is a retired sanitation and boatyard worker from the Bronx. His white hair is going wispy, but he is dimpled and handsome in a Popeye sort of way. Four years ago, he was living on Long Island with his girlfriend and started to get forgetful and belligerent. She left.

His son and daughter moved him to Stamford, Connecticut, near them, and installed him in a modest house on a quiet side street. He had an aide four hours a day, then six, then eight, then one night in January at 5 a.m. a neighbor found him wandering the block.

He was put in a nursing home — $400 a day, but it didn’t seem like adequate care. “They were trying, but they were overwhelmed,” said his son, Robert Dettmer, a doctor. He contacted a home care agency, Helping Hands. “Luckily, Marge was the first person they sent to us, and she was good.”

Bob’s son and daughter agreed to allow a reporter to spend time with their father and Marjorie.

Marjorie is 58, with a broad face, high cheekbones, merry eyes and an easy laugh. She emigrated from Jamaica, lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and has been an aide for more than 20 years. She is a freelancer, affiliated with Helping Hands.

When she arrived, she said, she had to hide Bob’s shoes, lock the garage and block the doors to keep him from running. He had urinated everywhere; the whole place stank. It took her weeks to get the house and Bob under control, to instill some semblance of order and routine.

All day, Marjorie switches hats: good cop, bad cop, kindergarten teacher. “In this field, you have to use a lot of psychology,” she said. “The worst thing I can do is fight with a sick person. The fire blaze, you have to be the extinguisher.”

Not all home care workers are particularly dedicated to their clients, of course. Marjorie said she had met plenty who do the bare minimum, clock in their time and go home. And some of the millions of elderly Americans abused each year are mistreated by paid caretakers.

For a while, Marjorie had it relatively easy with Bob: He rarely interrupted her sleep more than once a night. Now he gets up three or four times, so Marjorie does, too.

In her ample empty hours, Marjorie sometimes thinks about the life she doesn’t have.

“Usually in the summer I go party, a lot of barbecues, gospel boat rides or reggae,” she said. She loves her apartment in Brooklyn but rarely sees it. She sees her 2-year-old grandson even less.

When she is not actively attending to Bob, she is coexisting with him, and that is draining in itself.

“Sometimes he’s not living, he’s just existing,” Marjorie said. “What can you do? You just have to take care of them until they say goodbye.”

By July, Marjorie was near the end of her rope. Early one morning, she said, she went to change Bob and he raised his fist at her.

“You son of a bitch, if you touch me I’ll knock you out cold,” he roared, Marjorie recalled.

“I said: ‘Bring it on. I was raised with eight brothers and I raised three sons, you think I’m afraid of you?’”

She went to her room. She said she thought about cutting down to three days a week, but that felt terrible. She lay in bed and prayed for guidance.

The next day, Marjorie tried a new approach. “I went in there and I said, ‘Good morning, sunshine! It’s a beautiful morning! I’m going to give you some orange juice, and after that you’re going to take a nice shower, and after that I got a big breakfast for you!’” She has kept up the sweet talk ever since.

Somehow, she said, it pierced the fog. Bob grew more connected; his memory improved. He started changing his own wet diaper. Alzheimer’s does not get better in the long run, but for now, Marjorie said on a recent Thursday, “It’s like I can get through to him.”

The other day, she said, “He looked at me and said, ‘You’re a pretty woman.’

“I said, ‘Thank you, Bob, thank you.’ Made my day.”

This article originally appeared in

Providing Care All Day, for 27 Days a Month

STAMFORD, Conn. — Tuesday night was rough. A sharp scent drifted into Marjorie Salmon’s dream world at 4 a.m. She was still trying to rouse herself when its source, her 77-year-old client, pounded on her bedroom door, yelling that he wanted to go home.

<h1>Two friends from New York City were found dead in a reservoir in Westchester County early New Year’s Day after their fishing boat overturned, authorities said.</h1>

Kong’s sister-in-law, Elaine Kong, said that he was a former tractor-trailer driver who left a wife and a teenage son.

“He liked to go fishing,” Elaine Kong said.

This article originally appeared in <a id="46140693-57f3-46cf-bb07-e69e3ef7e06e" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/01/nyregion/fisherman-dead-westchester-boat.html">The New York Times</a>.

Their bodies were found beside their capsized rowboat by another fisherman who came to the Muscoot Reservoir around 7 a.m., said Capt. David Atkins of the state police.

Andy Newman

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