Mamdanis claimed triumph over DoorDash corporate greed isnt all it seems

Mayor Zohran Mamdani wants New Yorkers to think he got DoorDash, one of the country’s biggest food delivery companies, to pay a huge $131.5 million settlement to its workers at his command.  “DoorDash underpaid more than 260,000 workers, and today we are getting that money back,” he boasted last week.  Headlines aside, that’s hardly the full story.  Yes, DoorDash made a mistake.  The company admitted that $6.6 million in payments never reached NYC Dashers, and that a further $5.7 million arrived late.  That’s unacceptable: Gig-delivery workers deserve their earned wages, and the administration was right to ask for compensation and corrections.  Yet that doesn’t 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.  DoorDash failed to pay around $12.3 million in wages —  a small fraction, less than 10%, of the total settlement.

  And despite the trumpeting of the city’s socialists, the company’s mistakes affected less than 1% of total payments to its NYC labor force.  The individual payouts are puny: 65% of affected Dashers had a shortfall of $1 or less, with an average missing payment of $7.70.  Those figures seem more like accounting errors than the “corporate greed and impunity” Mandani railed against at his presser.   The largest part of the settlement, more than $83 million, came from a different — and entirely political — disagreement.  Dashers are meant to be paid for what’s known as “on-call time,” periods when they are on the app but not actively making a delivery.  But just being active in the app doesn’t equal working: The system would collapse if Dashers could claim billable hours for logging in but not actively taking delivery orders.

  The devil’s in the details, though; the city maintains DoorDash omitted on-call time that should have been paid.  And while DoorDas...