{"id":323028,"date":"2026-08-17T11:14:54","date_gmt":"2026-08-17T11:14:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/323028\/"},"modified":"2026-08-17T11:14:54","modified_gmt":"2026-08-17T11:14:54","slug":"mamdani-goes-after-amazon-and-flaunts-his-stunning-hypocrisy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/323028\/","title":{"rendered":"Mamdani goes after Amazon \u2014 and flaunts his stunning hypocrisy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mayor Zohran Mamdani has a message for Amazon<\/a>: Using delivery contractors to perform essential work is exploitation.<\/p>\n

City Hall\u2019s message to itself? Just send us the invoice.<\/p>\n

City Council Member Tiffany Cab\u00e1n\u2019s Delivery Protection Act<\/a>, which Mamdani has promised to sign, would require Amazon and others to employ last-mile warehouse and delivery workers directly.<\/p>\n

In practice, it would wipe out Amazon\u2019s Delivery Service Partner model<\/a> inside New York City.<\/p>\n

Amazon says that the 40-plus local delivery businesses it partners with employ over 5,000 New Yorkers.<\/p>\n

Amazon contracts with these delivery companies, which in turn hire their own workers \u2014 generally as regular employees, not as gig workers.<\/p>\n

Cab\u00e1n\u2019s bill would end those businesses\u2019 Amazon contracts, potentially sinking them.<\/p>\n

And while Amazon would have to offer jobs to the affected drivers, nothing guarantees them the same hours, routes, benefits or job security.<\/p>\n

Worse, though, is City Hall\u2019s abject hypocrisy.<\/p>\n

While Mamdani seeks to prohibit Amazon\u2019s delivery contracting model, his administration used an outside company to supply 109 temporary professionals to handle homeless services under an $8.46 million renewal that ran through June 30.<\/p>\n

It also renewed an $11 million citywide trucking contract that supplies outside drivers and labor.<\/p>\n

In both cases, private companies employed their own workers who then performed the necessary work \u2014 the same model that Mamdani condemns at Amazon.<\/p>\n

When City Hall buys labor through another employer, it calls that procurement.<\/p>\n

When Amazon does it, Mamdani calls it exploitation.<\/p>\n

Mamdani\u2019s defense of this contractor ban rests on a bait-and-switch: He cites workplace and traffic problems, then assumes subcontracting caused them.<\/p>\n

The comptroller\u2019s office has reported 9.2 injuries per 100 full-time-equivalent workers among Amazon delivery contractors \u2014 but didn\u2019t compare them to injuries among directly employed delivery workers, and didn\u2019t show how changing the name on workers\u2019 paychecks could possibly impact safety.<\/p>\n

Mamdani\u2019s crash argument is no stronger: Injury-causing crashes increased near 14 of 18 last-mile facilities after they opened, the comptroller found \u2014 yet the study didn\u2019t attribute those crashes to facility vehicles.<\/p>\n

If there are problems regarding last-mile delivery, there\u2019s no evidence that subcontracting causes them \u2014 certainly not enough to justify wiping out dozens of independent businesses.<\/p>\n

In fact, Amazon reports that its serious-crash rate in New York City fell 35.7% from 2024 to 2025 after contractors adopted camera-based alerts and driver coaching.<\/p>\n

Mamdani is claiming poor safety conditions to push an unrelated change in corporate structure \u2014 a policy non sequitur.<\/p>\n

Yet the bill he supports reaches for the largest possible hammer.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tGet opinions and commentary from our columnists\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSubscribe to our daily Post Opinion newsletter!\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\tThanks for signing up!\n\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Operators would be prohibited from contracting out core delivery and warehouse work.<\/p>\n

They would face onerous retention and training mandates<\/a> and, during the transition, a breathtaking $500,000 bond for each covered delivery worker left off the operator\u2019s payroll.<\/p>\n

And the bill provides nothing to the entrepreneurs whose businesses City Hall would make illegal.<\/p>\n

Consider Rudy Cazares, who operates an Amazon DSP and also contracts with FedEx.<\/p>\n

He employs about 130 W-2 workers, he told The Post, starting at $23.75 an hour.<\/p>\n

Cab\u00e1n and Mamdani would not discipline his Amazon operation; they would erase it.<\/p>\n

Then comes the giveaway: The bill\u2019s definition of \u201cfacility operator\u201d excludes governmental entities.<\/p>\n

Yet New York City couldn\u2019t function without contracts similar to Amazon\u2019s.<\/p>\n

In fiscal 2025, the city comptroller registered 12,500 new procurement contracts carrying a face value of $42.3 billion over multiple years.<\/p>\n

In fiscal 2024 alone, the city spent about $8 billion on human-service contractors<\/a>.<\/p>\n

These are not incidental purchases: City Hall delegates functions that it defines as core government responsibilities \u2014 including shelter operations, mental-health services and foster care \u2014 to outside employers.<\/p>\n

Even Mamdani\u2019s prized government grocery stores will be contracted out to private operators that will run them on the city\u2019s behalf.<\/p>\n

Specialized organizations, including delivery businesses, can provide expertise, flexibility and community knowledge that a sprawling bureaucracy lacks.<\/p>\n

Mamdani aims to destroy the intermediary and declare the worker saved.<\/p>\n

And he\u2019ll do so via an economic gamble that will inevitably reach consumers: This bill could raise costs by as much as $664 per household each year.<\/p>\n

Moreover, a city-only mandate makes New Jersey, Long Island and Westchester more attractive to delivery businesses.<\/p>\n

A city boundary is not a force field; warehouses can move while packages keep on coming.<\/p>\n

Longer routes mean more vehicle miles, higher costs and more congestion and emissions \u2014 the opposite of the bill\u2019s environmental sales pitch.<\/p>\n

Small retailers, working-class consumers and delivery workers would absorb the disruption.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a cleaner path: City Hall could instead regulate misconduct wherever it occurs, applying standards comparable to its own contracting arrangements.<\/p>\n

Mamdani should either apply his anti-subcontracting principle to his own government \u2014 or refrain from imposing it selectively on everyone else.<\/p>\n

Santiago Vidal Calvo is a Cities policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mayor Zohran Mamdani has a message for Amazon: Using delivery contractors to perform essential work is exploitation. City…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":323029,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[586,301,14010,9,11,10,299,33850,82],"class_list":["post-323028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-amazon","tag-city-council","tag-delivery-services","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-opinion","tag-tiffany-caban","tag-zohran-mamdani"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323028","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=323028"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323028\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/323029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=323028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=323028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=323028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}