How Amazon Landed on Mamdani’s Labor Agenda

**Josh Eidelson** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

**Sarah Holder** (0:09)
Special delivery.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani ran for office on a promise to take on powerful companies that he says exploit workers and avoid accountability. His latest focus is Amazon.

**Josh Eidelson** (0:24)
If it looks like an Amazon delivery.

**Sarah Holder** (0:28)
And it drives like an Amazon delivery.

**Josh Eidelson** (0:31)
And it's an Amazon delivery.

**Sarah Holder** (0:34)
Amazon relies on a network of thousands of drivers around the city to get its packages delivered on time. Those drivers are employed by third-party contractors, not by Amazon itself.
Amazon tells these subcontractors where to drive.

**Spencer Soper** (0:50)
Who to hire and what hours to work.

**Sarah Holder** (0:53)
Mamdani says Amazon should hire them.

**Spencer Soper** (0:57)
This is why I'm proud to support the Delivery Protection Act.

**Sarah Holder** (1:00)
The Delivery Protection Act was introduced in New York City Council last year. And last week, the mayor announced his support.
The bill would establish a licensing system for last-mile facilities, which are the final sorting and distribution sites before packages get to customers. It would also make companies like Amazon responsible for employing workers at those facilities, the workers who do the delivery. Amazon has come out against the bill, and it's poured $5 million into a campaign to defeat it. In response to Bloomberg's reporting, a spokesperson said the bill is, quote, forcing us to consider relocating delivery operations outside of the city, unquote, something the spokesperson said could lead to slower and more expensive delivery service. They said Amazon is trying to work, quote, collaboratively with the city council, unquote, to prevent that outcome.
This fight over worker classification has been a long time coming.

**Josh Eidelson** (1:59)
This is part of a larger phenomenon. I call it the who's the boss problem in the US economy.

**Sarah Holder** (2:05)
Josh Eidelson is a senior reporter at Bloomberg covering labor and work.

**Josh Eidelson** (2:10)
You have many workers who are core to a company's brand. Drivers for Uber, coders for Google, cashiers for McDonald's, who are generating a lot of profit for a company and following rules set by that company, but on paper are not considered by that company to be their employees.

**Spencer Soper** (2:34)
It's been this legally murky area for decades that companies have just been able to swim in.

**Sarah Holder** (2:42)
Bloomberg e-commerce reporter Spencer Soper says, If the Delivery Protection Act passes, it could make things a lot less murky, at least in New York. But the implications could reach much further.

**Spencer Soper** (2:54)
It obliterates this delivery service partner model that they've built nationally, internationally, actually. It obliterates it in New York. And so that's why Amazon is so worried about this, because they do see it as this test case.

**Sarah Holder** (3:12)
I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, New York City Council takes on Amazon's delivery driver model, and tries to answer that crucial question.
Who's the boss?

**Josh Eidelson** (3:31)
Amazon has an army of hundreds of thousands of drivers delivering millions of packages who are on paper employed not by Amazon, but by what Amazon calls delivery service partners. Much, much smaller businesses who Amazon contracts with to manage these drivers.

**Sarah Holder** (3:54)
Bloomberg's Josh Eidelson says these drivers have similar concerns as gig workers, like Uber drivers, but they're classified differently.

**Josh Eidelson** (4:02)
Often when people talk about gig workers, they're talking about workers who are classified by the company they're working for as independent contractors, 1099, people who are no one else's employee on paper. Subcontracted workers like fast food cashiers or content moderators for some tech companies or these delivery drivers, often they are classified as W2 employees, meaning they have to be paid minimum wage and so on, but employees of somebody that most Americans have never heard of.
In both cases, you have a big, famous, powerful company that says it is not the employer of a group of workers.

**Sarah Holder** (4:50)
And Spencer, why does the company use this model? What are the benefits for Amazon?

**Spencer Soper** (4:55)
If you look at what the benefits of this model can be, it does separate the type of benefits workers can get.
So if Amazon were employing all of these drivers directly, it would have to offer them the same health and medical benefits as like employees on Amazon's payroll.
The way they do this now, it's up to those smaller companies to decide what kind of benefits to offer. And you can see some disparity in the benefits level. It also comes down to liability. There's so many other things that you pay into for having employees, things like workers' compensation insurance, unemployment insurance, the insurance on the vehicles.