A delivery worker in the snow in New York City on Sunday.Milo Hess/ZUMA
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced on Friday that his administration has secured a more than $5 million settlement with three delivery app companies. The money, which includes both backpay and civil penalties, will go to nearly 50,000 delivery workers who Uber Eats, Fantuan, and HungryPanda underpaid in 2023 and 2024.
As part of the new deal, Mamdani said that Uber has also agreed to reinstate up to 10,000 workers who were wrongfully deactivated.
Mamdani made the announcement at a Long Island City food hall flanked by delivery workers. I spoke to the mayor briefly before the event and asked how he sees the settlement as supporting his affordability agenda.
“We have to lower costs to make this a more affordable city,” Mamdani said. “We also have to ensure that New Yorkers are earning what they’re owed. And the law, for far too long, especially when it comes to delivery workers, has been considered to be a suggestion as opposed to a requirement.”
During the interview, I also asked Mamdani about what he believes the city can do to ensure that New York’s largely immigrant delivery workers are protected from another potential threat: ICE.
“We have to inform every single New Yorker—and that includes delivery workers—of their rights,” the mayor said.
“When you get a knock at the door,” he added, “[and] someone tells you that they are an ICE agent, you do not have to let them in your home unless they provide you with a judicial warrant signed by a judge. It’s not instinctive. It has to be informed. It has to be taught. It has to be shared.”
“The law, for far too long, especially when it comes to delivery workers, has been considered to be a suggestion as opposed to a requirement.”
The new settlement comes after the Mamdani administration sued a delivery app called Motoclick and its CEO earlier this month for allegedly violating minimum wage requirements for workers. The city said that the app used “shocking tactics” such as “charging workers a $10 fee for canceled orders and deducting the entire cost of refunded orders from workers’ pay.” (The lawsuit aims to shut down the company in addition to getting backpay for workers.)
The efforts to protect delivery workers are being spearheaded by New York’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection and its new commissioner, Samuel Levine. I asked Levine, who previously worked under Mamdani transition co-chair and former Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan, if he thought the lawsuit against Motoclick and the warning letters recently sent to delivery to ensure compliance with gig worker laws played a role in the city’s ability to secure the settlements announced on Friday.
“I think it does,” Levine said. “My general view…is that companies only will come to the table if you’re prepared to actually take them to court.” He added, “If they perceived [DCWP] as an agency that wasn’t actually prepared to go to the mat for workers, I’m not sure these settlements would have been reached.”
Along with the settlements, a new set of laws protecting delivery workers took effect on Monday after being passed by the city council last year. One set of laws expands minimum pay protections to cover workers who deliver groceries for companies like Instacart. Mamdani has embraced those protections, which were passed by the city council last year over the vetoes of former Mayor Eric Adams.
The law also now requires that customers be offered a tipping option when checking out. That is particularly significant in light of a recent report from DCWP that found that moving the tipping option until after checkout reduced UberEats and DoorDash delivery workers’ tips by more than $550 million.
Gustavo Ajche, a co-founder of Los Deliveristas Unidos, a worker-led collective founded during the pandemic, told me he’s been doing delivery work since coming to New York from Guatemala in 2004. He’s now mostly delivering for Uber and DoorDash.
Ajche is optimistic about Mamdani. “Fighting for better conditions for all workers can be a reality,” he explained. “Because he’s not playing a game—like used to be the case. Because as we were dealing with the last mayor, it’s like, one day he’s with us and the next day, eh.”
