Mamdani’s Delivery Bill Pushed One Amazon Contractor to Admit He Would Have No Business Left

Zohran Mamdani built his mayoral campaign on making New York City more affordable for everyone.

Now his new delivery bill is forcing Amazon's subcontractors to choose between massive new costs and leaving the city altogether.

One small business owner who delivers Amazon packages across the city just admitted what the bill would really cost him.

The Delivery Protection Act Forces Amazon to Hire Drivers It Now Subcontracts

City Council Member Tiffany Cabán wrote the bill.

Mamdani, a self-described socialist, announced it on August 10 and promised to sign it.

Under the Delivery Protection Act, delivery operators would need a city license to keep running, and that license comes with new training and safety rules plus pressure to bring subcontracted drivers onto the payroll directly.

Amazon currently works through more than 40 subcontractors who employ roughly 5,000 delivery workers across the five boroughs.

Amazon spokeswoman Kelly Nantel said the bill puts every one of those 5,000 jobs at risk.

She said Amazon would consider pulling its delivery operations out of the city entirely rather than absorb the new mandates.

Amazon has already funneled more than 5 million dollars into a lobbying effort called the Five Boroughs Jobs Campaign to kill the bill, according to state disclosures.

An economic analysis commissioned for that campaign puts the real number even higher, warning that more than 10,000 jobs tied to the delivery industry could disappear once indirect and supporting work is counted.

Rudy Cazares runs one of those subcontractor businesses.

He did not hedge when he described what the bill would do to him: "I would be shutting my business down. I have no business."

Manhattan Institute scholar Daniel Di Martino had a blunter message for the voters who elected Mamdani on an affordability platform – get ready to pay more for your Amazon deliveries.

City Journal writer Adam Louis Sebastian Lehodey reported in May that the jobs Mamdani's bill is supposedly rescuing already pay delivery partners an average of 24 dollars an hour, with healthcare included.

Teamsters locals pushed Cabán's bill through committee with heavy union backing, framing subcontracted delivery work as exploitation that only direct Amazon employment can fix.

The New York Post's opinion page already summed up the double standard in four words: "Just send us the invoice."

Socialists rarely apply the rules they write to the government that wrote them.

California Already Ran This Experiment and the Results Devastated Workers

New York is not the first place a Democrat tried to force gig and delivery workers into traditional employment.

California passed AB 5 to do exactly that, reclassifying independent contractors as employees across dozens of industries.

A Mercatus Center study tracking the aftermath found self-employment in California fell 10.5 percent after the law took effect.

Overall employment fell 4.4 percent.

In professions where independent work was common, the damage was far worse – employment dropped as much as 28 percent in some fields.

The researchers found no meaningful increase in workers landing full employee status to replace the ones who lost their gigs.

California's labor force participation fell by at least 6.5 percent in the law's wake.

Seattle ran a smaller version of the same experiment on gig delivery drivers in 2024, setting a mandated pay rate for every task.

DoorDash reported losing 30,000 orders within weeks.

UberEats saw order volume collapse 30 percent.

The city hall logic was identical to Mamdani's: force the pay up by government decree and workers automatically come out ahead.

Drivers who were supposed to benefit from the new mandated pay instead saw their total earnings fall as tips dried up and the number of available tasks shrank.

DoorDash told regulators it operated at a loss in Seattle through 2024 and raised its fees the following year, and the company says Seattle is now the most expensive delivery market in the country.

The Affordability Promise New York Is About to Break

Mamdani sold himself to New Yorkers as the candidate who would lower their cost of living, not the candidate who would run a socialist experiment on the city's small businesses.

Every version of this experiment – California's contractor law, Seattle's gig pay mandate – produced the opposite result: fewer jobs, higher prices, and workers earning less than before the government stepped in to help them.

Rudy Cazares is not an abstraction in an economics paper.

He is a named business owner in Mamdani's own city telling reporters, on the record, that this bill ends his business.

Amazon has already told the city it is willing to walk away from New York delivery operations rather than absorb the mandate, and 5,000 workers are sitting on the other side of that decision.

New York City is about to find out if Cabán and Mamdani actually read what happened in Sacramento and Seattle before they wrote this bill.

Cazares already gave them the answer.

Sources:

• Jarrett Stepman, "Mamdani Promised Affordability. His New Amazon Delivery Plan Could Make NYC More Expensive," The Daily Signal, August 11, 2026.
• New York Post, "Amazon has vowed to fire thousands of NYC workers if Mamdani labor bill passes," New York Post, October 16, 2026.
• La Voce di New York, "Mamdani Backs Bill Forcing Amazon to Hire Delivery Drivers Directly," La Voce di New York, August 21, 2026.
• Adam Daly, "Mamdani Takes Aim at Amazon Subcontracting Model in Multimillion-Dollar Delivery Bill Fight," amNewYork, August 10, 2026.
• Liya Palagashvili, Paola A. Suarez, Christopher M. Kaiser, and Vitor Melo, "The Effects of AB 5 on the California Labor Market," Mercatus Center, 2024.
• Reason, "California's Attack on Gig Work Predictably Drove Workers Out of Jobs," Reason, January 18, 2024.
• Legal Insurrection, "Report Confirms Seattle's 2024 Gig Worker Law Has Been a Miserable Failure," Legal Insurrection, February 2026.