Amazon delivery drivers in New York wear the company’s uniforms, follow its routes, and are tracked by its software. Yet, legally, they don’t work for Amazon. The Delivery Protection Act (DPA), a bill introduced by socialist New York City Councilor Tiffany Cabán and with a committee hearing scheduled for April 9, would try to resolve that mismatch by requiring certain last-mile delivery facilities to be licensed by the city and, in practice, forcing companies like Amazon to take responsibility for the workforce they already direct. It is the next step in a series of city laws regulating the delivery economy — following minimum pay rules and workplace standards — that have improved conditions at the margins while leaving the structure of the system intact.

That structure is not especially difficult to describe. Amazon runs a delivery network in which drivers’ working conditions and schedules are determined by the e-commerce giant, yet they are formally employed by small contractors known as Delivery Service Partners (DSPs). The company determines how the work is done; the subcontractor absorbs the liability when something goes wrong.

The arrangement has the advantage, from Amazon’s perspective, of allowing it to present itself as both central and peripheral to the job, depending on the circumstance.

“Professional drivers like me power New York’s economy, but every day we have to deal with dangerous working conditions and an employer that acts like we don’t even work for them,” said Luc Rene, a driver at DBK4, an Amazon facility in Queens. “The only way to stop Amazon’s abuse of us and the communities we serve is to pass the Delivery Protection Act.”

“If there’s an issue, Amazon can always say those drivers don’t work for us,” Antonio Rosario, an International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) organizer in the union’s Amazon division, explained. “But when their drivers do something good, all of a sudden they’re Amazon employees. You can’t pick and choose. You have to be responsible to your workforce.”

The same dynamic shows up in the day-to-day economics of the job. DSP owners operate under contracts they do not set, with rates and expectations that can shift, while drivers work under conditions they do not control. The costs accumulate in damaged vans, insurance premiums, fines, injuries — the steady wear and tear of moving packages through the city — while the company directing the system remains insulated from them.

The DPA is written to collapse that arrangement by fixing responsibility in place. “It would hold Amazon accountable to their workforce,” Rosario said. “When you have your hands so deep into the operation — you have your claws sunk into it — you cannot pretend these drivers don’t belong to you.” He describes the subcontracting layer bluntly: the DSP owner, in practice, “is no more than a low-level manager,” with Amazon dictating wages, routes, and conditions. The bill’s licensing requirement is central to that shift. If a company does not comply with the conditions attached to that license, it would not be allowed to continue making last-mile deliveries in the city. As part of the proposed licensing requirements, the bill also requires companies to give workers thirty-day dismissal notice before termination; protects them against retaliation from employers; and requires serious job and safety training by an outside organization.

Who Employs the Drivers?

The IBT’s organizing campaign has been working along the same fault line. The Teamsters have been building unions among DSP drivers by treating Amazon as the real employer behind the system — filing for union recognition, organizing strikes, and pressing joint-employer claims before the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). In California, where some of those efforts have advanced furthest, labor board officials have already found that Amazon can qualify as a joint employer based on the degree of control it exercises over drivers’ work, even as the company continues to contest those findings.

The same question — who actually employs the drivers — now runs through both the NLRB cases and the New York City legislation. The DPA would not resolve that dispute, but it would shift the terrain on which it is being fought.

Amazon is treating the bill accordingly. The company is lobbying city hall while running a parallel campaign to shape how the work is understood. It has tried to produce a more favorable account from within its workforce. A recent promotion, offering $1,000 prizes to drivers who submit testimonials about why they like their jobs, frames the system as a matter of individual preference rather than one structured by quotas and surveillance. That messaging effort sits alongside a more direct push at elected officials.

“They are definitely going to city council members,” Rosario said. “They are trying to manipulate the narrative.” Amazon representatives have been bringing council members through delivery facilities, he said, with conditions staged in advance: “They usually have the place all cleaned up. . . . They want them to see it at their best.” Workers are selected ahead of time to speak, and what is presented is a controlled version of the operation rather than the conditions drivers describe on the job.

Cabán has described that effort as coordinated. In a video about the legislation, she said Amazon is deploying outside consultants, paid advertising, and a broader messaging campaign — a “full-court press” against the legislation. The scale of the response reflects what is at stake. The bill has majority support in the council for a second time.

National Stakes

For Amazon workers, the stakes extend beyond New York City. IBT leaders have framed the bill as a potential model for other jurisdictions, arguing that if it passes in New York, similar efforts will follow elsewhere.

“We’re confident that New York is going to be the first city in the country to get this done,” said Thomas Gesualdi, president of Teamsters Joint Council 16. “We’re in a new era of politics in the five boroughs — one where workers and their advocates are in the driver’s seat — and this bill embodies that spirit.”

“I’m committed to passing the Delivery Protection Act to protect New Yorkers from dangerous and exploitative last-mile delivery operations,” Cabán said. “With at least half a billion packages expected to be delivered to New Yorkers this year, it’s no surprise that big corporations are fighting tooth and nail to defeat this bill.”

The DPA is framed by its backers as both a labor measure and a public-safety one, tying workplace conditions to the streets those conditions run through — traffic, curb use, emissions — and addressing a regulatory gap that has allowed last-mile facilities to expand with relatively little oversight. A recent New York City Comptroller’s Office report on last-mile delivery impacts links the growth of those facilities to increased traffic risks and workplace hazards and recommends clarifying responsibility for the system as it exists. The DPA follows that logic by fixing responsibility in place.

The answer is not purely technical. The bill’s path runs through city hall, where Mayor Zohran Mamdani has positioned himself in favor of regulating the delivery industry and supporting delivery workers, winning significant wage settlements for workers and directing city agencies to pursue additional enforcement. At this stage, the DPA has not been a central priority of the administration, which is not unusual for a bill still moving through committee, but whether the mayor’s office decides to intervene more directly will matter as the vote approaches. The earlier round of delivery legislation showed that the council can move despite industry opposition; this bill goes further, into the structure of the employment relationship itself, and has drawn a response from Amazon to match.

What the bill targets is a system built on a separation that is visible in the work itself. Drivers move through dense neighborhoods under pressure to meet quotas set by software they do not control, while responsibility for crashes, tickets, and injuries is pushed down onto the subcontractor — or the driver — rather than the company organizing the system. The work is already organized this way; the DPA simply assigns responsibility for it.