Mamdani goes after Amazon — and flaunts his – Latest News
Mayor Zohran Mamdani has a message for Amazon: Using supply contractors to carry out important work is exploitation.
City Hall’s message to itself? Just ship us the bill.
City Council Member Tiffany Cabán’s Delivery Protection Act, which Mamdani has promised to signal, would require Amazon and others to make use of last-mile warehouse and supply employees immediately.
In observe, it could wipe out Amazon’s Delivery Service Partner model inside New York City.
Amazon says that the 40-plus native supply companies it companions with make use of over 5,000 New Yorkers.
Amazon contracts with these supply corporations, which in flip rent their own employees — usually as common staff, not as gig employees.
Cabán’s invoice would finish these companies’ Amazon contracts, probably sinking them.
And whereas Amazon must offer jobs to the affected drivers, nothing ensures them the identical hours, routes, advantages or job security.
Worse, although, is City Hall’s abject hypocrisy.
While Mamdani seeks to ban Amazon’s supply contracting model, his administration used an outdoors company to produce 109 non permanent professionals to deal with homeless providers beneath an $8.46 million renewal that ran via June 30.
It additionally renewed an $11 million citywide trucking contract that provides outdoors drivers and labor.
In each circumstances, personal corporations employed their own employees who then carried out the required work — the identical model that Mamdani condemns at Amazon.
When City Hall buys labor via one other employer, it calls that procurement.
When Amazon does it, Mamdani calls it exploitation.
Mamdani’s protection of this contractor ban rests on a bait-and-switch: He cites office and visitors issues, then assumes subcontracting brought on them.
The comptroller’s workplace has reported 9.2 accidents per 100 full-time-equivalent employees amongst Amazon supply contractors — however didn’t evaluate them to accidents amongst immediately employed supply employees, and didn’t show how altering the identify on employees’ paychecks may probably impression security.
Mamdani’s crash argument is no stronger: Injury-causing crashes elevated close to 14 of 18 last-mile amenities after they opened, the comptroller discovered — but the research didn’t attribute these crashes to facility autos.
If there are issues relating to last-mile supply, there’s no proof that subcontracting causes them — actually not enough to justify wiping out dozens of unbiased companies.
In truth, Amazon experiences that its serious-crash fee in New York City fell 35.7% from 2024 to 2025 after contractors adopted camera-based alerts and driver teaching.
Mamdani is claiming poor security situations to push an unrelated change in company construction — a coverage non sequitur.
Yet the invoice he helps reaches for the biggest potential hammer.
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Operators can be prohibited from contracting out core supply and warehouse work.
They would face onerous retention and coaching mandates and, during the transition, a breathtaking $500,000 bond for every lined supply employee left off the operator’s payroll.
And the invoice gives nothing to the entrepreneurs whose companies City Hall would make unlawful.
Consider Rudy Cazares, who operates an Amazon DSP and additionally contracts with FedEx.
He employs about 130 W-2 employees, he informed The Post, beginning at $23.75 an hour.
Cabán and Mamdani wouldn’t self-discipline his Amazon operation; they might erase it.
Then comes the giveaway: The invoice’s definition of “facility operator” excludes governmental entities.
Yet New York City couldn’t operate with out contracts just like Amazon’s.
In fiscal 2025, the town comptroller registered 12,500 new procurement contracts carrying a face worth of $42.3 billion over a number of years.
In fiscal 2024 alone, the town spent about $8 billion on human-service contractors.
These will not be incidental purchases: City Hall delegates features that it defines as core authorities tasks — together with shelter operations, mental-health providers and foster care — to outdoors employers.
Even Mamdani’s prized authorities grocery shops might be contracted out to non-public operators that may run them on the town’s behalf.
Specialized organizations, together with supply companies, can present experience, flexibility and neighborhood data that a sprawling paperwork lacks.
Mamdani goals to destroy the middleman and declare the employee saved.
And he’ll achieve this by way of an financial gamble that may inevitably attain customers: This invoice may raise prices by as a lot as $664 per family every year.
Moreover, a city-only mandate makes New Jersey, Long Island and Westchester more enticing to supply companies.
A metropolis boundary just isn’t a power discipline; warehouses can transfer whereas packages keep on coming.
Longer routes imply more vehicle miles, larger prices and more congestion and emissions — the alternative of the invoice’s environmental gross sales pitch.
Small retailers, working-class customers and supply employees would take up the disruption.
There’s a cleaner path: City Hall may as an alternative regulate misconduct wherever it happens, making use of requirements akin to its own contracting preparations.
Mamdani ought to both apply his anti-subcontracting precept to his own authorities — or chorus from imposing it selectively on everybody else.
Santiago Vidal Calvo is a Cities coverage analyst on the Manhattan Institute.
