Mamdani goes after Amazon and shows off his stunning hypocrisy

Mayor Zohran Mamdani has a message for Amazon: Using delivery contractors to perform essential work is exploitation.City Hall’s message to itself? Just send us the invoice.City Council Member Tiffany Cabán’s Delivery Protection Act, which Mamdani has promised to sign, would require Amazon and others to employ last-mile warehouse and delivery workers directly.In practice, it would wipe out Amazon’s Delivery Service Partner model inside New York City.Amazon says that the 40-plus local delivery businesses it partners with employ over 5,000 New Yorkers.Amazon contracts with these delivery companies, which in turn hire their own workers — generally as regular employees, not as gig workers.Cabán’s bill would end those businesses’ Amazon contracts, potentially sinking them.And while Amazon would have to offer jobs to the affected drivers, nothing guarantees them the same hours, routes, benefits or job security.Worse, though, is City Hall’s abject hypocrisy.While Mamdani seeks to prohibit Amazon’s 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.It also renewed an $11 million citywide trucking contract that supplies outside drivers and labor.In both cases, private companies employed their own workers who then performed the necessary work — the same model that Mamdani condemns at Amazon.When City Hall buys labor through another employer, it calls that procurement.When Amazon does it, Mamdani calls it exploitation.Mamdani’s defense of this contractor ban rests on a bait-and-switch: He cites workplace and traffic problems, then assumes subcontracting caused them.The comptroller’s office has reported 9.2 injuries per 100 full-time-equivalent workers among Amazon delivery contractors — but didn’t compare them to injuries among directly employed delivery workers, and didn’t show how changing the name on worke...