Amazon workers, Teamsters, labor supporters and City Council members rallied outside City Hall last week to demand a vote on the Delivery Protection Act. Protesters said New York City needs to stop allowing large delivery companies to profit from workers who wear their uniforms while still claiming these workers do not directly work for them.
The legislation, sponsored by Council Member Tiffany Cabán, would allow some last-mile warehouses to be licensed by the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. It would also set safety and training rules and require companies to directly employ workers who do major delivery and warehouse work.
Supporters say the bill would close what they call Amazon’s subcontracting loophole. Opponents — including Amazon, delivery service providers, logistics firms and business groups — say the new rules could drive up costs, disrupt thousands of jobs and threaten small delivery businesses.
But workers at the rally, like José Huerta, had a different take. Huerta said he has worked five years at Amazon’s DBK1 facility in Woodside, Queens. He described days when drivers are blamed for delays caused by broken equipment. “Sometimes we have to work a little longer because we don’t always have the necessary tools to make our deliveries,” Huerta said. “We don’t…have the necessary tools to make our deliveries, like a forklift — or sometimes the phones they give us to work with don’t work; I mean, the battery runs out quickly, and we have to keep calling the dispatcher to send us another phone.”
He said that sometimes dispatchers also are slow in replacing the phones and workers are subject to discipline for taking too long on deliveries.
Latrice Johnson, a former Amazon delivery driver who said she was laid off with more than 100 other drivers after Amazon got rid of a contractor’s agreement, said the daily work at the company often meant unsafe vans, broken equipment and rising package loads. “Poor safety, driving vans that are broken, the equipment that’s given to us to work with sometimes it’s broken,” Johnson said. “So, for example, hand trucks. I was given a hand truck that the metal was ripped off there. They still gave it to me to work with. I could have easily cut myself using that.”
Johnson said the public often sees only the convenience of fast delivery, not the labor behind it. “Like me, I make sure I come back to zero packages,” she said. “Not for the company, but for the families out there that’s just waiting on diaper deliveries, kids running up to me with smiles, waiting for Amazon, because they’re probably waiting for a birthday gift or something they ordered. They’re happy to see me coming.”
Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s recent endorsement of the Delivery Protection Act gave it new political momentum. He said corporations like Amazon have built “billion-dollar business models” by insulating themselves through subcontracting, while last-mile delivery centers have grown alongside rising worker injuries and street-safety concerns. City officials and supporters cite a 2025 report by former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander that found that 78% of areas near last-mile facilities had increases in injury-causing crashes after those facilities opened.
At City Hall, Council members Sandy Nurse, Yusef Salaam, and Crystal Hudson joined workers and advocates in calling for passage of the bill. Nurse called the bill one of the Council’s “top priorities” and said, “we care about our workers, and we are proud to take on one of the biggest corporations in this country right now. We will bring Jeff Bezos to heel.” Hudson told the crowd, “If it looks like an Amazon worker, it sounds like an Amazon worker, then gosh darn it, we’re here to say it’s an Amazon worker and they need to receive the benefits and pay that they absolutely deserve.”
Theodore Moore, executive director of ALIGN and a leader in the New Yorkers for a Fair Economy coalition, said the bill is gaining strength because workers and community organizations have made Amazon’s subcontracting model a public accountability issue. “The Delivery Protection Act is doing really well,” Moore said. “Just this week, we reached a supermajority of council sponsors. We are up to 34 sponsors, which means we’re looking forward to voting sometime in the next few weeks.”
Moore said the bill counters the fact that Amazon controls the work but denies responsibility if something goes wrong. “Amazon itself is such a large corporation, but it has such little responsibility for the harm it actually causes,” he said. “Oftentimes, you see a package being delivered; you see it coming in an Amazon truck. The person who gets out driving it has on an Amazon vest and uniform, but they don’t actually work for Amazon. They work for third-party DSPs, which then contract with Amazon.”
Moore said the city would make the company operating the delivery system responsible for the workers carrying it out. “That’s what the Delivery Protection Act does; it basically says that if you drive an Amazon truck, if you wear an Amazon uniform, if you’re delivering packages for Amazon, you’re an Amazon employee, and they are responsible for it.”
Moore said subcontractors could still exist, but not as a shield for companies that keep control while avoiding liability. “The companies themselves could still exist so they can still contract with other companies like they still have trucks but it’s saying this particular model that Amazon has –– where basically they are subcontracting and still holding all of the power –– that model needs to cease to exist.”
Amazon and allied business groups have pushed back, arguing the bill could hurt delivery service providers and their workers. An industry-sponsored study cautioned that the proposed legislation could jeopardize more than 10,000 jobs while driving up delivery fees for local households. Amazon has also said its New York delivery partners include more than 40 local small businesses employing more than 5,000 people, and that the bill, as written, could undermine fast, affordable delivery.
