Your GrubHub courier might not actually work for GrubHub so the company can avoid paying minimum wage

Deceitful delivery?A new report reveals that Grubhub knowingly schemed to cheat its couriers out of minimum wage.According to Streetsblog, in 2024, the popular food delivery service began outsourcing a percentage of its orders to Relay, another delivery app exempt from NYC delivery-app minimum-wage requirements.Essentially and legally, starting in 2024, if you ordered delivery from Grubhub, your food courier should have been making over $19 an hour.

However, with Grubhub’s shady tactic, the person who brought you the goods was more than likely working for Relay and making only $13 an hour.Streetblog maintains that this tactic was implemented to circumvent NYC’s worker protection laws.

An internal email sent to Grubhub’s tech workers and obtained by Streetsblog states:“The partnership [with Relay] arises primarily to stem elevated driver pay costs in NYC, which have more than doubled since the new driver pay law was introduced.”Passed in 2021, the aforementioned law forces app companies to pay their workers a guaranteed hourly rate.The law initially required companies to pay delivery workers $17.96 an hour, which was raised to $19.96 in April 2025 and is now $21.44 per hour.This wage will continue to be adjusted annually for inflation.

This wage is intended to support and protect drivers who operate as private contractors and lack employee benefits such as health insurance or workers’ compensation.Predictably, and with draconian flair, DoorDash, Uber, and Grubhub sued the city in an unsuccessful bid to stop the law.

However, Relay’s business model was deemed distinct enough for a judge to grant an injunction allowing the company to ignore the law, creating a legal loophole that Grubhub would ruthlessly exploit.During this time, Grubhub workers were unceremoniously kicked off the app without explanation, a deactivation that led many to sign up for Relay, which paid its private contractors just $13.35 per hour, meaning they did the exact same work f...