Mamdani Promised Affordability. His New Amazon Delivery Plan Could Make NYC More Expensive.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is once again using a big corporation as an easy target in a scheme that will likely make New York City more unaffordable, not less.

On Monday, the socialist mayor announced the so-called Delivery Protection Act—which received significant union backing—that will allegedly be used to “rein in the power of corporate delivery giants like Amazon, hold them accountable for their exploitative business model and make New York City’s streets safer for workers, drivers and pedestrians.”

The policy will apparently create “a licensing system for certain last-mile warehouses and distribution facilities while establishing new safety, training and labor standards.”

Like so many other Mamdani policies, this one was announced with a slick video.

“If it looks like an Amazon delivery and drives like an Amazon delivery, then it’s an Amazon delivery, right? Not according to Amazon,” Mamdani wrote in his X post attached to the video. “Big companies like Amazon have built a vast network of subcontractors who deliver their packages while shielding them from accountability. It leaves our workers unprotected and our streets less safe. It’s time for a change.”

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This isn’t the first time Mamdani has gone after Amazon.

Just last week he hit the online retailer and a host of other companies with a cease-and-desist order over selling e-bikes. Mamdani didn’t want to deal with the problem of rapidly increasing pedestrian deaths by holding reckless, lawbreaking e-bike riders accountable.

That would be unfair.

Instead, he went after those supposedly greedy businesses and made it just a bit harder for law abiding people in the city to get an e-bike.

Much like the e-bike idea, the crackdown on Amazon’s subcontractors—because that’s ultimately what this is—will likely hurt more people than it will help.

The New York Post has done a good job of explaining why squeezing out Amazon’s subcontractors is so misguided. The Post noted in April that in New York City, Amazon relies on “more than 40 subcontractors who employ some 5,000 workers to drive Amazon’s branded vans and e-bikes across the city.”

Those small businesses aren’t happy.

“I would be shutting my business down. I have no business,” Rudy Cazares, an Amazon delivery partner, said of the law in an interview with the New York Post on Monday.

Those small businesses are in deep trouble, not that Mamdani and friends seem to care. But it isn’t clear that this will provide much of a benefit to the workers who, in many cases, will simply be out of a job.

I’m not going to cry for Amazon here; the big megacorporation will almost certainly adapt.

An Amazon spokeswoman, Kelly Nantel, said to Business Insider that the legislation would make it less likely the company would stay committed to hiring local workers through their subcontractors.

“As written, this legislation would directly undermine that commitment—threatening the small businesses that deliver to customers, putting the jobs of more than 5,000 of their employees at risk and forcing us to consider relocating delivery operations outside of the city,” she said.

It’s not hard to figure out how that will hurt Amazon customers.

Deliveries will suddenly take longer and will be more expensive as the logistical machine Amazon built untangles and adapts to the suboptimal conditions. I’m guessing this will come as a bit of a shock to city dwellers.

As Manhattan Institute scholar Daniel Di Martino noted on X, there’ll be more than a few Mamdani voters who will get quite a shock on that front.

Sure, it would be great to improve pay and safety for workers in the city. But it likely won’t even do that, according to City Journal reporter Adam Louis Sebastian Lehodey.

“Neither Amazon Delivery Partners’ nor other companies’ work conditions are particularly egregious,” he wrote in May. “Besides creating pathways for delivery employees to become entrepreneurs in their own right, wages average $24 per hour, and all Delivery Partners are required to offer healthcare to employees.”

By forcing deliveries to come from outside New York City, workers will spend more time navigating the long roads in rather than the local neighborhoods. Is that really going to make them safer?

The bottom line is that the law’s benefits seem marginal at best, its downsides are negative in the aggregate and acute for many small businesses and their employees. That’s hardly another big win for the “affordability” that Mamdani promised.