Mamdani Backs Bill Forcing Amazon to Directly Hire NYC Delivery Workers, Amazon Warns of Job Cuts

New York City Council is weighing a bill that would fundamentally reshape Amazon's delivery model in the five boroughs. Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced Monday, August 10, that he's backing the Delivery Protection Act, a measure sponsored by Council Member Tiffany L. Cabán that would force companies like Amazon to directly employ the workers who deliver packages, rather than routing them through third-party subcontractors.

"If Amazon is delivering your packages, they should follow the same rules as any other delivery company," Mamdani said in a video announcing his support, according to Business Insider and Engadget.

Amazon doesn't hire most of its delivery drivers directly. It works through what it calls Delivery Service Partners, DSPs, independent companies that hire the actual drivers. Amazon sets the routes, the schedules, and the productivity quotas, according to a Bloomberg Businessweek investigation cited by City Hall and reported by Patch. But legally, those drivers work for the DSP, not Amazon. That means when something goes wrong, Amazon isn't the one holding the bag.

The bill, per the Mayor's Office, would require companies operating qualifying last-mile warehouses to get licensed through the city's Department of Consumer and Worker Protection and would hold the operating company, not just the subcontractor, responsible for employing workers who perform delivery. It would also set new safety and training standards.

City Hall is leaning on numbers to make the safety case. A 2025 report from the Office of the City Comptroller found that 78 percent of areas near last-mile facilities saw a rise in injury-causing crashes after those facilities opened, according to Patch. In Maspeth, crashes near major FedEx and Amazon warehouses jumped 53 percent and 48 percent respectively. Since 2017, at least 18 large last-mile facilities have opened citywide, 11 of them since 2020.

Amazon isn't taking this quietly. Spokesperson Kelly Nantel told Business Insider the legislation "would directly undermine" the company's ability to hire local workers, "threatening the small businesses that deliver to customers, putting the jobs of more than 5,000 of their employees at risk and forcing us to consider relocating delivery operations outside of the city." Amazon told the council the bill would prohibit its agreements with more than 40 local DSPs that employ thousands of New Yorkers.

A coalition called the New York Delivers Coalition, made up of 50 small businesses by its own description, sent a letter to the council opposing the bill and planned a demonstration in East Harlem, according to VINnews. Rudy Cazares, who runs an Amazon delivery contracting business and also works as a FedEx contractor, said the rules could force him to close, telling reporters his company employs about 130 workers with full- and part-time benefits.

An economic analysis cited by opponents estimated the bill could cost the average New York household hundreds of dollars more a year in delivery costs, VINnews reported, though that estimate is disputed and depends heavily on how companies actually respond.

If Amazon and FedEx genuinely shift operations outside the five boroughs, small subcontracting businesses like Cazares's don't survive the transition, and delivery costs for ordinary New Yorkers could rise. Companies do sometimes follow through on relocation threats when regulatory costs spike, and treating that risk as pure bluster isn't fair to the businesses making that argument.

But there's a fight over who's actually behind the opposition. The Teamsters, in a press release distributed via PR Newswire and posted on teamster.org, claimed Amazon has spent over $5 million on a "dark money campaign" against the bill, funneled through a group called the Five Borough Jobs Campaign that the union says gets 97 percent of its funding from Amazon. Teamsters General President Sean M. O'Brien called Amazon's DSP model "the most dangerous business model in America today." Randy Korgan, director of the Teamsters Amazon Division, called it an "astroturf misinformation campaign." Amazon has not publicly disputed the Teamsters' funding figures in the sources reviewed here.

The Teamsters also brought out a worker, Latrice Johnson, from Amazon's DBK4 facility in Maspeth, Queens, who said Amazon shut down her DSP and fired the entire staff over text with less than a day's notice. That anecdote fuels the union's core argument: subcontracting lets Amazon walk away from workers with zero accountability.

Both sides are working from real data and real incentives. The comptroller's crash numbers are hard to argue with. Amazon's job-loss warning isn't fantasy either, given how companies have relocated distribution operations before when costs rose elsewhere.

The City Council hasn't voted yet. No timeline for a vote has been announced in the sources reviewed here. Whether Amazon actually pulls operations if the bill passes, or whether that's a negotiating position, remains untested until lawmakers actually cast votes.