Mayor Mamdani wants to ban the \u201cscam\u201d food delivery platform Motoclick after it admitted to paying workers less than a quarter of New York City\u2019s required delivery worker minimum wage, city officials told a federal judge on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Motoclick self-reported paying workers as little as $1.82 per hour in April and between $3.67 and $4.67 in May \u2014 far less than the minimum pay rate of $22.13, city officials revealed in court filings submitted as part of an ongoing federal lawsuit against the company and its CEO, Juan Pablo Salinas Salek.<\/p>\n
\u201cPaying hardworking delivery workers as little as three to four dollars an hour is not only morally wrong, it\u2019s illegal,\u201d the city\u2019s top lawyer and Corporation Counsel Steve Banks said in a statement. \u201cAs our legal action makes clear, the city of New York will not tolerate companies that abuse their workers and violate our local laws.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Motoclick, a so-called \u201cbusiness-to-business\u201d delivery service, recruits restaurants as clients and provides its fleet of bike-riding delivery workers to fulfill orders placed through other apps. The company\u2019s website says it is \u201cintegrated\u201d with Uber Eats, DoorDash, Grubhub, and Delivery.com.<\/p>\n
The Mamdani administration sued Motoclick and Salek in January after a years-long investigation by the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection under former Mayor Eric Adams. The city began investigating February 2024 after receiving complaints about violations of the minimum wage laws from over 20 workers. <\/p>\n
With Motoclick now admitting to underpaying its workers, the Mamdani administration on Wednesday asked a federal judge to halt the company from doing business in the city at all pending the results of the city\u2019s lawsuit. <\/p>\n
\u201cFlouting the law and illegally underpaying workers is simply unacceptable,\u201d DCWP Commissioner Samuel Levine<\/a> said in a statement. \u201cDCWP is taking immediate action to shut Motoclick down unless and until it comes into compliance. New York will not allow this company to continue underpaying New Yorkers.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Motoclick\u2019s model is similar to that of now-defunct delivery app Relay, which Grubhub contracted<\/a> to avoid paying the minimum pay standard for delivery workers in 2024. Motoclick uses \u201cself delivery\u201d options offered to restaurants by bigger apps like Uber Eats, Grubhub and DoorDash to offer eateries a lower cost delivery option.<\/p>\n In its suit, DCWP accused Salek of running \u201ca scam that targets and steals from immigrant workers.\u201d Beginning in April 2022, Salek used WhatsApp to personally recruit Spanish-speaking immigrants, then stole their tips and earnings while failing to pay them minimum wage, the city alleged.<\/p>\n Workers who signed up with Salek would then get assigned orders through the \u201cMoto Driver\u201d app or through WhatsApp. Workers had to accept deliveries before knowing how much they would get paid or how far they would have to travel, in violation of the city\u2019s delivery worker laws, the city alleged.<\/p>\n As of Tuesday afternoon, Motoclick still listed the WhatsApp number on its website. The company\u2019s Instagram feed included frequent posts with Spanish-language AI-generated video content directing workers to WhatsApp. <\/p>\n Motoclick also deducted fees from workers, included $10 deductions for cancelled orders, leaving some with a negative balance with the company, according to the lawsuit. <\/p>\n A February 2024 letter from DCWP to the company went unanswered for nine months before Motoclick Assistant Manager Paula Salek finally responded and claimed not to know about the city\u2019s minimum pay standard, the city said.<\/p>\n Motoclick and Salek deny the allegations, and insisted in their court filings that the minimum wage law is unconstitutional \u2014 an argument that has already failed several times over in court cases involving other app companies.<\/p>\n Salek founded Motoclick parent company Patio Delivery Inc. in 2015 and incorporated the firm in New York City as \u201cMotoclick\u201d in 2021, according to court filings. <\/p>\n Levine\u2019s cash-strapped<\/a> DCWP has gone all out against app companies, taking action against delivery apps Fantuan, Hungry Panda<\/a> to win $9.3 million in restitution for workers<\/a>. Mamdani also launched a delivery worker safety training<\/a> coupled with a stern letter to industry players about compliance.<\/p>\n App companies, for their part, spent millions last year on campaigns for City Council and in support of Mamdani\u2019s chief mayoral opponent Andrew Cuomo. <\/p>\n The city\u2019s regulations have survived several legal challenges, forcing apps to pay workers a minimum pay standard and provide more transparency<\/p>\n \u201cWe are grateful to Commissioner Levine, the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection and the city Law Department for taking decisive action to hold\u00a0Motoclick\u00a0accountable for some of the most brazen alleged wage theft we have seen in this industry,\u201d said Ligia Guallpa, executive director of Worker\u2019s Justice Project and a cofounder of Los Deliveristas Unidos, which organized workers to fight for the minimum pay standard law.\u00a0\u201cNo worker should be earning three or four dollars an hour while delivery companies profit from their labor.\u201d<\/p>\n Reps for Motoclick did not immediately comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mayor Mamdani wants to ban the \u201cscam\u201d food delivery platform Motoclick after it admitted to paying workers less…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":276764,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[128,9,24,63,129,131,130],"class_list":["post-276763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-the-bronx","tag-bronx","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-the-bronx","tag-the-bronx-headlines","tag-the-bronx-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276763\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}