STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — New York City’s business community is making its latest push against regulatory legislation, this time targeting the city’s last-mile delivery industry.
Dennis Canale — the founder of Wired Delivery Service, a last-mile company based on Staten Island — said the City Council’s Delivery Protection Act could lead to him going out of business.
“This bill would actually restrict us so much, potentially putting us out of business,” Canale said. “We operate on a family basis.”
Canale didn’t offer specifics on which aspects of the bill would hurt his business, only saying it would cut into his revenue so significantly that it would no longer make sense to stay open. A report published Thursday says he is not alone.
The report from engineering consulting firm AKRF found that the bill could impact hundreds of small businesses in the five boroughs, eliminate more than 10,000 local jobs in the worst-case scenario, and possibly double costs for the average e-commerce consumer. The Five Boroughs Jobs Campaign, a consortium of business organizations around the city, commissioned the study.
John Neill, a senior vice president for economics and real estate at AKRF, said the biggest impact on the city’s economy would be the delivery businesses simply leaving the five boroughs for parts of the metro area where they wouldn’t have to abide by the new law.
“They know it to be realistic, and in speaking with them that’s basically what we’re hearing would be their reaction to this bill,” Neill said. “They would need to relocate outside of the city to service as they do today, and you know that’s just not really a workable solution for a lot of these.”
The legislation reads largely as a licensing and worker protection bill, and proponents say it’s necessary to regulate an industry that has largely operated with little local regulation since the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic swept the globe in 2020.
Department of Consumer and Worker Protection Chief of Staff and Deputy Commissioner for External Affairs Carlos Ortiz submitted testimony to the City Council in April backing the legislation.
“In the last decade, last-mile facility jobs have grown significantly in New York City, and companies in this space are benefiting from record profits,” Ortiz wrote. “Even though last-mile facilities subcontract work, they still maintain significant control of workers’ schedules, workflow and lives, often times pressuring workers to reach unreasonable quotas without taking responsibility for any subsequent issues that arise.”