Amazon is spending $5M to kill a single New York City bill, and the size of that cheque is the most honest story the company has said about the fight.
The measure is the Delivery Protection Act, backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani and carrying a majority of the City Council, and it would do the one thing Amazon has spent years and fortunes avoiding: make the company directly employ the couriers who deliver its packages.
Yet, the company frames this as a threat to jobs and prices, but it is really a threat to a very useful fiction.
That fiction is the gap between the logo on the vest and the name on the payslip. The bill, introduced by Council Member Tiffany Cabán and since embraced by Mamdani, would require any company running last-mile delivery hubs in the city to directly employ the people who do the delivering.
Amazon is the obvious target, though FedEx and several regional couriers would be caught too. It should pass, and other cities should copy it word for word.
