{"id":358731,"date":"2026-09-28T12:28:11","date_gmt":"2026-09-28T12:28:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/358731\/"},"modified":"2026-09-28T12:28:11","modified_gmt":"2026-09-28T12:28:11","slug":"mamdanis-triumph-over-doordash-greed-isnt-all-it-seems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/358731\/","title":{"rendered":"Mamdani’s triumph over DoorDash ‘greed’ isn’t all it seems"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mayor Zohran Mamdani\u202fwants New Yorkers to think he got DoorDash, one of the country\u2019s biggest food delivery companies, to pay a huge $131.5 million settlement to its workers <\/a>at his command.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cDoorDash underpaid more than 260,000 workers, and today we are getting that money back,\u201d he boasted last week. \u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

Headlines aside, that\u2019s hardly the full story.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

Yes, DoorDash made a mistake.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"MayorMayor Zohran Mamdani signing a ceremonial check at a press conference to announce a $131.5 million settlement with DoorDash on Sept. 22, 2026. William Farrington for The NY Post<\/p>\n

The company admitted that $6.6 million in payments never reached NYC Dashers, and that a further $5.7 million arrived late.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

That\u2019s unacceptable: Gig-delivery workers deserve their earned wages, and the administration was right to ask for compensation and corrections.\u202f\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

Yet that doesn\u2019t mean $131.5 million was stolen from workers by a greedy delivery company, as Mamdani suggested Tuesday in a press conference complete with a giant prop check.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

DoorDash failed to pay around $12.3 million in wages \u2014 \u00a0a small fraction, less than 10%, of the total settlement. \u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

And despite the trumpeting of the city\u2019s socialists, the company\u2019s mistakes affected less than 1% of total payments to its NYC labor force.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

The individual payouts are puny: 65% of affected Dashers had a shortfall of $1 or less, with an average missing payment of $7.70.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

Those figures seem more like accounting errors than the \u201ccorporate greed and impunity\u201d Mandani railed against at his presser. \u00a0\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

The largest part of the settlement, more than $83 million, came from a different \u2014 and entirely political \u2014 disagreement.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

Dashers are meant to be paid for what\u2019s known as \u201con-call time,\u201d periods when they are on the app but not actively making a delivery<\/a>.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

But just being active in the app doesn\u2019t equal working: The system would collapse if Dashers could claim billable hours for logging in but not actively taking delivery orders. \u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

The devil\u2019s in the details, though; the city maintains DoorDash omitted on-call time that should have been paid.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

And while DoorDash had been paying for on-call time, it was doing so under a different formula, one that it considered \u201cfair, practical and legal.\u201d\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

Instead of getting buried in a years-long legal fight and shouldering the immense cost of litigation against a city with endless taxpayer resources, the company just accepted the city\u2019s formula.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

In fact, no court decided the settlement: The consent order concluded the administrative investigation without a single hearing or judicial determination.<\/p>\n

As Department of Consumer and Worker Protection Commissioner Sam Levine admitted, \u201cIt\u2019s complicated.\u201d\u202f\u00a0<\/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

Nonetheless, Mamdani combined the admitted cases of payment failure with the disputed on-call calculation into a broad anti-capitalist narrative \u2014 and called it corporate wage theft.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, workers are set to receive about $115.4 million of the total $131.5 settlement.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

The rest of the cash covers civil penalties ($11.3 million), a new monitoring program ($4.3 million) and the cost of administering the settlement ($468,000).\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

That leaves City Hall with a penalty payout of roughly $16.1 million \u2014 money that won\u2019t go to workers at all.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

Huge grants from that amount are earmarked for the Workers Justice Project \u2014 a DSA-aligned labor pressure group with deep ties to Mamdani and his mayoral campaign \u2014 and for Princeton University\u2019s Workers\u2019 Algorithm Observatory, to monitor a slew of new red-tape compliance measures.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

So before they cheer the Dashers\u2019 win, New Yorkers should take a good look at the fine print.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

How will the $4.3 million in monitoring costs be spent, and how will success be measured?\u00a0<\/p>\n

What will the city do with the $11.3 million in penalties? Mamdani hasn\u2019t said.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

Taxpayers should also know the extent of the city resources spent on the three-year-long investigation.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

The probe included city lawyers, investigators, economists and data scientists \u2014 all paid by taxpayers.<\/p>\n

The DCWP Research and Analytics Division spent months combing through the records on 110 million working hours and 152 million individual DoorDash transactions.\u202f<\/p>\n

So taxpayers funded a large-scale operation<\/a> against DoorDash \u2014 and Mamdani took the credit.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

And the new mayor\u2019s claim to the trophy must also carry a very large asterisk.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

After all, the inquiry started under his predecessor, Mayor Eric Adams, and was well underway by the time Mamdani took office.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mamdani can take credit for completing the race, but not for having started it.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, he\u2019s turned what he inherited \u2014 an acknowledged corporate payment failure and a newly imposed pay formula \u2014 into a $131.5 million political triumph.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

But before Mamdani cashes the check, taxpayers deserve to see the full receipt.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n

Santiago Vidal Calvo is a Cities policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mayor Zohran Mamdani\u202fwants New Yorkers to think he got DoorDash, one of the country\u2019s biggest food delivery companies,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":358732,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[302,341,9,24,63,299,122,124,123,5591,82],"class_list":["post-358731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-city-hall","tag-doordash","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-opinion","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news","tag-settlements","tag-zohran-mamdani"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358731","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=358731"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358731\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/358732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=358731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=358731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=358731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}