Sooner or later in today’s America, if your business model depends on dodging labor protections, you will be told to pay what you owe. It doesn’t matter how many packages you ship or how fast you ship them. Ask Amazon.
On Monday New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani endorsed the Teamsters-backed Delivery Protection Act. Introduced by Democratic Socialists of America council member Tiffany Cabán, the bill would require Amazon to reclassify the subcontractors and workers in its delivery network as employees. It would also extend basic protections to workers at other delivery companies such as FedEx.
Workers and their allies are using New York City to test-drive the end of the labor-shielding model. They hope to take it nationwide. Mr. Mamdani’s office says Amazon and others use subcontractors “to shield them from responsibility,” which “leaves workers vulnerable and corporations free to avoid accountability for reckless conditions on city streets.” That is the truth.
Amazon’s last-mile delivery network relies on some 40 subcontractors, which employ more than 5,000 workers. The network moves goods quickly because it shifts wages, insurance, and liability onto small operators; the “flexibility” it sells workers is the freedom to be denied sick leave, unemployment insurance, and the right to organize. For the workers — among them college students and home caretakers — there is no bargaining power, no stable schedules, and no path to the protections that come with a real job.
Amazon requires its subcontractors to provide full-time employees health coverage and paid time off — and then structures the contracts so drivers can be classified outside those protections. A wage that disappears the moment an injury sidelines them is not a wage; it is precarity. Subcontractor drivers earn on average roughly $24 an hour when they are on the clock. Many subcontractors offer additional benefits, including tuition assistance and paid vacation, when they can afford to; the small-business owners are squeezed between Amazon’s margins and the workers’ needs.
These small businesses are not the diversity story Amazon tells. Amazon says “25% are owned by Black or Hispanic entrepreneurs, 10% are veteran-owned, and 10% are graduates of our Road to Ownership program” — a company initiative that helps a favored few high-performing employees become business owners while leaving the rest of the workforce without the protections of direct employment. It dresses exploitation in the language of advancement and gives Amazon a captive workforce it can blame when drivers organize.
Subcontractors are required to carry workers’ compensation for workers injured on the job, the bare legal minimum. Vans are equipped with technology that lets Amazon monitor drivers and offload blame onto the small operators. The cargo e-bikes that couriers pedal around Manhattan cannot travel faster than 12 miles per hour because the work is dangerous and the people doing it are exposed. That is what Amazon’s flexibility looks like on the street. If New York City streets are becoming more perilous, Amazon’s extraction model shares the blame.
One effect of the bill would be to hold Amazon directly liable for accidents rather than letting plaintiff attorneys chase the small-business partners. Requiring Amazon to employ the workers directly would also force the company to carry the insurance coverage a corporation of its size should already carry. That is the point: make Amazon answer for the model it has built.
A study commissioned by the Five Borough Jobs Campaign — a coalition of economic development groups that has received funding from Amazon — estimated that the Delivery Protection Act would increase household costs by $664 a year. That is the price of treating workers as employees rather than as risk-shedding costs of doing business in New York. It is a small fraction of what Amazon’s last-mile model has been costing New Yorkers in damaged vehicles, injured cyclists, and the legal and medical bills that small-business subcontractors cannot fully absorb.
Amazon warns that compliance costs could force it to relocate its 10 distribution centers outside the reach of city politicians and regulators — perhaps Long Island or New Jersey. That is the same threat Amazon makes whenever a city asks it to honor the workers who deliver its packages. It is a threat to hold New York hostage, and it deserves to be answered as one. Say goodbye to same-day delivery, or say goodbye to the labor model that depends on dodging the law.
Leading the campaign for the bill is Teamsters President Sean O’Brien. United Parcel Service laid off tens of thousands of workers in part because the cost of its 2023 labor contract with the Teamsters cut into its margins — a contract that won union drivers the wages and protections that Amazon’s model is now designed to escape. Amazon subcontractors are now delivering many of the packages that Teamsters UPS workers previously did. Work once done by union drivers earning family wages is now done by misclassified contractors working with no floor.
The National Labor Relations Act does not allow sub- and independent contractors to unionize. By requiring direct employment, the bill would restore to Amazon’s workers the right to organize that the subcontracting model has stripped from them. Mr. O’Brien held a rally Monday for the bill with DSA members, including Ms. Cabán and state Assemblywoman Claire Valdez, who in June won a House primary.
Independent streamer Hasan Piker is promoting the bill on social media. All of this makes Vice President JD Vance’s courtship of the Teamsters president all the more transparent: the Vice President is trying to peel labor away from the coalition fighting for it.
Ending the misclassification of workers has been a longstanding demand of worker advocates, and they are clear-eyed about who pays when the system runs over people. The “little guy” the donor class claims to defend is the worker it built a business model to avoid paying.
