New York City’s elected activists can’t stop micro-managing app-based food delivery.
It’s an obsession driven by economic ignorance that harms the low-wage, unskilled workers the left claims to care about so deeply.
In 2023, the City Council imposed new minimum-wage regulations on apps such as Uber Eats or Doordash, which employ bicycle deliverymen to pick up food from restaurants to deliver to customers: It hiked wages to above $20 an hour, forcing the apps to do strict recordkeeping to track time on-call and time making deliveries.
The Department of Consumer and Worker Protection correctly predicted that wages — and prices — would rise, yielding fewer deliveries as some customers decided that paying an extra 10 bucks to get sandwiches delivered wasn’t worth it.
And, in fact, the “reform” drove thousands of delivery workers out of the industry, while those who remain are working much harder.
And now the City Council thinks it can stop that job-killing effect . . . by giving app deliverymen job protections that most American workers can only dream of.
New York, like almost every other state, follows the doctrine of “at-will employment,” meaning that (with limited exceptions) you can be fired for any reason, or no reason, at any time.
But progressives’ new bill would prevent the apps from “deactivating” delivery workers without “just cause.”
Being extremely slow in completing deliveries, for instance, wouldn’t be sufficient reason for termination.
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Plus, the company would have to give workers 15 days’ notice and written explanations of which rules it believes they violated. And in the event of “bona-fide” economic distress, it would have to give 120 days’ notice.
More, the apps couldn’t deactivate any delivery worker unless they could prove he knowingly violated the rules.
Prove to who? The law prescribes an arbitration system that could occupy a team of labor lawyers for years, and requires back pay, lawyers’ fees and thousands of dollars in penalties and fines if the worker’s termination is found to be “without cause.”
Food delivery is casual labor, done mostly by undocumented people with few options or skills beyond knowing how to ride a bike.
Nobody wants these folks to be exploited, but it’s beyond nuts for the City Council to devote so much of its attention to imposing some supposed “perfect justice” on a minor service that’s worked well enough for decades with basically no oversight at all.