Amazon Vows to Axe 7,000 NYC Jobs Over Mamdani Driver Bill

If you have ever wondered what it costs to tell Amazon how to treat its workers, the number is now public: 7,000 jobs, 15 warehouses, one entire city. On October 16, the company put New York on notice — pass the Delivery Protection Act, the labour bill backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and Amazon will rip its last-mile network out of the five boroughs rather than directly hire its own delivery drivers. The bill's supporters call that blackmail. Amazon calls it arithmetic. And if you are tempted to call it a bluff, ask Montreal.

That last sentence is not rhetoric. It is the closest thing this story has to a precedent, and it is grim: early last year, Amazon shut down seven warehouses near Montreal after a union organised 300 workers at a Laval facility. By March, roughly 1,900 warehouse workers and 2,800 delivery contractors had lost their jobs. The company denies the closures had anything to do with the union. The empty buildings — and the rent Amazon is still paying on them — tell a different story.

Photo: The Amazon fulfillment center in Troutdale, Oregon — a typical US last-mile-style facility. Amazon has threatened to shutter 15 such last-mile sites in New York City if the Delivery Protection Act becomes law. Credit: Tedder / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The bill, in plain English

The Delivery Protection Act does something deceptively simple: it would require Amazon — and other delivery giants like FedEx and DoorDash — to employ delivery drivers directly instead of routing them through third-party contractors. In New York City alone, that means roughly 5,000 drivers who currently wear Amazon vests, drive Amazon-branded vans and deliver Amazon packages would finally be, in the eyes of the law, Amazon employees.

That distinction matters enormously. Across the country, about 4,500 tiny companies act as Amazon's delivery service partners, or DSPs — the nominal employers on paper, even as the logistics giant dictates the routes, the quotas, the uniforms and the vans. Direct employment would make Amazon responsible for wage protections, safety standards, benefits and legal liability. It would also make it far harder for the company to do what it has done repeatedly when drivers organise: simply cancel the DSP contract and watch the jobs evaporate.

Proponents say the change would raise pay and make a dangerous job safer. The city's own comptroller found that crashes increased 78 percent in areas near a last-mile facility after it opened — drivers rushing to meet punishing delivery quotas, putting themselves and everyone around them at risk. "For years, Amazon has relied on a convoluted subcontracting system that denies last-mile drivers the protections other workers get, while maintaining extraordinary control over their schedules, workloads, and uniforms," said Julie Su, New York City's deputy mayor for economic justice, in a statement.

The bill was first introduced by Queens Council Member Tiffany Cabán and reintroduced in 2026, with Mayor Mamdani's backing. We checked the bill's status against the City Council's public tracker records cited this week: no vote has been scheduled, and it still holds majority support in the 51-member chamber. That gap — majority support, no vote — is where this fight is actually being fought, and both sides know it.

Montreal is the warning

Amazon does not directly employ delivery drivers anywhere else in the United States, and it has built its entire last-mile empire on keeping it that way. When the New York bill threatened that model, the company's response was swift and specific: shutter all 15 last-mile warehouses in the city, move thousands of roles elsewhere, and lay off the roughly 2,000 internal warehouse workers who staff those facilities — on top of the 5,000 contracted drivers whose jobs would effectively cease to exist in the five boroughs.

Logistics experts told the Post the threat should be taken at face value. "Amazon will retaliate, because it has to send a firm message to the rest of the country that 'If you mess with us, this is what will happen,'" said Marc Wulfraat, president and founder of Montreal-based logistics consultancy MWPVL International. "When you look at Amazon's global operations, they close buildings left, right and center when there is union activity."

Wulfraat knows the Montreal story up close, and it is worth dwelling on because it is the template. The dispute centred on a warehouse in Laval, where the Confédération des syndicats nationaux had organised 300 workers. Amazon's response was not to negotiate, or even to fight the union at that one site. It closed seven warehouses across Quebec. Amazon denies any link between the union drive and the closures. But the real-estate trail is awkward for that denial: the facilities sit vacant, Wulfraat told pulptastic, with Amazon still paying rent on more than 1.6 million square feet of space it spent hundreds of millions to build, and at least two sites being offered as subleases. Companies do not normally pay eight figures in rent on empty buildings for fun. They pay it to make a point.

Amazon has form beyond Quebec, too. In 2023, the company abruptly severed ties with a delivery contractor in Palmdale, California, after that contractor voluntarily recognised a Teamsters union of drivers and dispatchers — the company's signature move, as labour organisers describe it: when workers organise, the contract dies, and the jobs die with it. It is a pattern so consistent that even Microsoft's dramatic walkout from its UK data-centre deal mid-IPO looks, by comparison, like a company merely changing its mind.

A five-million-dollar street fight at City Hall

While the warehouses hang in the balance, the real battle is being fought in mailboxes and on television screens. New Yorkers have been hit with a barrage of mailers and videos warning that delivery will get slower and more expensive if the bill passes. According to Labor Notes, citing NY Focus, Amazon has spent more than $5 million on lobbying, TV and social-media advertising to defeat the measure — a campaign aimed squarely at the City Council members whose votes will decide this.

The lobbying lineup is its own story. Council Speaker Julie Menin, who would normally be expected to move a bill with majority support, is not on board. And leading the fight to kill the legislation is Jessica Schumer — the daughter of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer — a detail that tells you how seriously the company is taking a municipal labour bill. Amazon's public line is that the bill would destroy small businesses: by making DSP operators extinct, the company says, the legislation is "threatening the small businesses that deliver to customers."

That framing deserves scrutiny. The DSPs are small businesses in the same sense that a franchise is a small business — nominally independent, functionally tethered. Amazon controls the work, the pay structure and the performance metrics; the DSP absorbs the liability. It is a neat arrangement for everyone except the driver, which is precisely the point the bill's supporters are making.

Amazon has also escalated the rhetoric beyond lobbying. The company has threatened that if the bill passes, it will pull out of New York entirely — forcing customers to collect their orders at hubs in New Jersey. It is a vivid image, and a deliberately chosen one: the company wants every council member picturing angry constituents. A company-funded study, cited by BusinessToday, claims closures would raise delivery times and prices, with same-day and same-morning delivery hit hardest. Treat that study the way you would treat any research paid for by a party to the fight — but do not ignore the underlying logic. Fifteen last-mile facilities cannot vanish without the delivery map changing.

The political weather, meanwhile, is shifting against big tech on multiple fronts. The White House has just ended the era of AI self-regulation, ordering incident reporting across the industry. A similar delivery-driver bill is under consideration in Chicago. Amazon is fighting this in New York not just for New York, but because a win for Mamdani's council would hand every other city in America a working template.

The people the bill is actually about

It is easy, in a story about mayors and multinationals, to lose the drivers. Latrice Johnson is one of them. She drove out of a Maspeth, Queens, warehouse called DBK4 until last year, when Amazon suddenly shut down her delivery contractor. She and 149 co-workers were laid off with less than a day's notice. She remembers hearing, when she came in to work: "There's no more routes, so you no longer have a job." A month earlier, she had received a top award for her work performance. "It was a slap in the face," she said. The job had been a lifeline for providing for her daughter.

Johnson's story is not an outlier; it is the business model working as designed. The Teamsters charge that Amazon violated labour law by retaliating against drivers for organising, and say that by cancelling DSP contracts, the company has terminated the jobs of nearly 500 delivery workers at the DBK4 station alone, where drivers for multiple contractors had taken part in a strike. Johnson now spends her time knocking on doors, telling voters what surprised her when she started the job: "I was confused, too, when I first started working, and they told me I don't work for Amazon. We wear the vests. We drive the vans. We deliver the packages."

Her confusion is the whole argument for the bill in one anecdote. If the company controls the vest, the van, the route and the quota, the claim that it is not the employer is a legal fiction — one that a National Labor Relations Board ruling this June, finding Amazon was not a joint employer with its DSPs, has only entrenched. Workers and their allies have knocked on more than 11,000 doors across the Bronx, Manhattan, Brooklyn and Staten Island, according to the Teamsters, trying to turn that confusion into council votes.

Our read: do not call this a bluff

Here is where we stop summarising and start judging, because this story deserves a straight answer: Amazon means it. Calling the threat a bluff is a shoddy reading of the company's record. In Montreal, Amazon swallowed a colossal bill — hundreds of millions in built-out facilities, ongoing rent on 1.6 million square feet of empty warehouse — rather than tolerate a union at a single site. A company willing to pay that price to send a message will not flinch at shuttering 15 last-mile stations in Queens and the Bronx to stop a law that could replicate itself in Chicago, Los Angeles and every other city watching this fight.

We ran the numbers: 5,000 contracted drivers plus 2,000 warehouse staff makes this the largest labour standoff in Amazon's history on a per-city basis — bigger, in headcount terms, than the entire Quebec exit. And it is landing at a moment when the company is already in a cutting mood. Amazon just eliminated just under 1,000 white-collar roles in its Stores division across the US, India and the UK, part of the broader wave that has put AI at the top of America's layoff charts, on top of a roughly 30,000-role corporate reduction that began late last year. A company already shrinking its workforce will not agonise over 7,000 more.

None of which means Mamdani's side is wrong to try. The honest tension here is brutal: the bill would genuinely improve the lives of drivers like Latrice Johnson, and it might genuinely cost thousands of those same drivers their jobs. Both things can be true. But the council should negotiate like it understands which of the two outcomes Amazon prefers — because the company has now told them, in public, twice, in two countries.

What happens next

The bill has majority support and no vote scheduled, which means the outcome will be decided in back rooms before it is ever decided on the council floor. Watch three things. First, whether Speaker Menin moves the bill or buries it — her position is the single biggest variable. Second, whether the Chicago bill advances, which would turn a New York fight into a national one and harden Amazon's position further. Third, whether the company's New Jersey-hubs threat is real logistics planning or theatre; either way, it is designed to make the political cost of passing the bill visible before a single vote is cast.

One way or another, this ends with a precedent. Either a major American city successfully rewrites the terms of Amazon's labour model — and every other city takes notes — or Amazon demonstrates, again, that the price of crossing it is measured in thousands of jobs and paid in public. Montreal already knows how the second version goes. New York is about to find out if the first one is possible.

Update, Oct. 19: the experts say Amazon means it

Industry experts told the New York Post the threat is not a bluff. Former Amazon logistics executive Brittain Ladd said the company 'wouldn't blink about shutting down the 15 facilities in New York City if it felt that the legislation was a threat to its business model' — because the model could be copied in other cities. Consultant Marc Wulfraat put it blunter: 'Amazon will retaliate, because it has to send a firm message to the rest of the country that "if you mess with us, this is what will happen."' Amazon's own spokesperson, Steve Kelly, defends the contractor model as 'best served by a network of local small businesses deeply embedded in their communities.' The legislative state of play: Queens Council Member Tiffany Cabán reintroduced the Delivery Protection Act in 2026 with roughly 34 council co-signers, but no vote has been scheduled — and a source close to the talks says Mamdani supports the bill and some version 'will have to pass,' though the final product may leave both sides unhappy. One carve-out: the 5,500 workers at the JFK8 fulfillment center on Staten Island, who voted to unionize in 2022, would not be touched.

Sources: New York Post (Oct 16, 2026); Firstpost; BusinessToday (Oct 19, 2026); The Times of India; Labor Notes (Oct 9, 2026); Reuters via The Hindu BusinessLine; Matzav; pulptastic; internewscast.com. Montreal real-estate figures attributed to Marc Wulfraat via pulptastic; lobbying-spend and legislative-battleground details via Labor Notes.

By TechPulse USA

TechPulse USA is a US tech and AI news publication covering the stories that move the industry — from Silicon Valley boardrooms to Washington and beyond.