New York City’s mayor isn’t even a month into his term, and he’s already delivering a crushing blow to delivery app companies.
In a bombshell intervention, Zohran Mamdani and Department of Consumer and Worker Protection commissioner Sam Levine announced that three delivery apps will be forced to repay $4.6 million in wages held back from deliveristas, New York City’s app-based delivery workers.
According to NYC Streetblog, the three main culprits being forced to settle are Uber Eats, Fantuan, and Hungry Panda. The three settlements were the result of a sweeping investigation into broader delivery app practices, which included GrubHub and DoorDash.
“The era of giant corporations juicing profits by underpaying workers is over,” Levine said in a statement. “I’m proud that this agency is not only returning full back pay, but is recovering damages and penalties to send a strong message that cheating workers will not be tolerated.”
Per the mayoral administration, Uber Eats unfairly deactivated and underpaid thousands of workers between December 4, 2023, and September 2, 2024. It’s now being forced to pay $3,150,000 in worker relief penalties across over 48,000 workers, in amounts ranging from $8.79 to $276.15.
In addition, Uber Eats will have to pay the city of New York $350,000 in civil fines — a drop in the bucket compared to the $13.7 billion in revenue the company brought in throughout 2024, but a win for the worker-friendly administration all the same.
The decision strikes a major blow to an industry that has historically relied on its political and financial largess to avoid consequences for horrifying worker abuses resulting from algorithmic management systems.
“For years, app companies treated the law as optional — hiding behind algorithms, stealing wages, and deactivating workers without consequence,” Ligia Guallpa, executive director of the Workers’ Justice Project, told NYC Streetblog in a statement. “The scale of these abuses proves what deliveristas have been saying for years: exploitation is not an accident — it’s baked into the app delivery business model.”
James Parrott, a senior fellow at the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School, concurred.
“For far too long, delivery and other online labor platform companies have not only underpaid workers, but deactivated them with abandon, denying workers the ability to make a living,” he said.
Perhaps surprisingly, Uber hasn’t denied any wrongdoing and went as far as to thank officials for bringing light to the issue.
In a statement to NYC Streetblog, Uber spokesman Josh Gold said that “we’re glad to have this resolved.”
“After DCWP notified us of the issue in August 2024, we immediately corrected it, agreed to pay more than the amount owed, and appreciate the new administration moving quickly to bring this to a fair conclusion,” he said.
More on delivery: Delivery Robot Gets Stuck on Train Tracks, Gets Obliterated by Locomotive