A bill introduced by socialist City Councilwoman Tiffany Cabán would force e-commerce giant Amazon to directly employ its drivers and harm other online retailers. Sipa USA via Reuters Connect In another bit of supposed do-gooding that’s guaranteed to boost costs for regular New Yorkers, City Council progressives are looking to shut down the “last-mile delivery” industry to appease Big Labor.
This would goose customer bills roughly $664 a year — another blow to NYC affordability.
City Councilwoman Tiffany Cabán (D-Queens) wants to slam the small, independent services that contract with Amazon, FedEx, DHL, FreshDirect and other businesses to finalize deliveries from distribution centers, forcing them to directly hire their own drivers simply to make it easier for the Teamsters to unionize these workers.
Many would just respond by moving their centers outside the five boroughs, killing jobs inside the city in a sector that now employs at least 50,000 New Yorkers.
As last week’s raucous committee hearing on Cabán’s bill, Intro 518, Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce chief Randy Peers warned the “direct-hire mandate” wouldn’t protect workers, as progs pretend, but only ensure “people will lose their jobs.”
Cabán’s bill echoes the misguided deliverista laws that have killed jobs and spiked costs around restaurant- and grocery-delivery apps.
Speaker Julie Menin has so far declined to take a stand on this idiocy, a sign that her common sense can be held hostage by unions’ demands for ever-more control of the city economy.
The rise of e-commerce has been one of the biggest recent pluses for quality of life in the Big Apple; don’t let the progressives roll back the clock.
