Mamdani’s claimed triumph over DoorDash ‘corporate greed’ isn’t all it seems

Mayor Zohran Mamdani wants New Yorkers to think he got DoorDash, one of the country’s biggest food delivery companies, to pay a huge $131.5 million settlement to its workers at his command.  

“DoorDash underpaid more than 260,000 workers, and today we are getting that money back,” he boasted last week.   

Headlines aside, that’s hardly the full story.  

Yes, DoorDash made a mistake.  

The company admitted that $6.6 million in payments never reached NYC Dashers, and that a further $5.7 million arrived late.  

That’s unacceptable: Gig-delivery workers deserve their earned wages, and the administration was right to ask for compensation and corrections.  

Yet that doesn’t mean $131.5 million was stolen from workers by a greedy delivery company, as Mamdani suggested Tuesday in a press conference complete with a giant prop check.  

DoorDash failed to pay around $12.3 million in wages —  a small fraction, less than 10%, of the total settlement.   

And despite the trumpeting of the city’s socialists, the company’s mistakes affected less than 1% of total payments to its NYC labor force.  

The individual payouts are puny: 65% of affected Dashers had a shortfall of $1 or less, with an average missing payment of $7.70.  

Those figures seem more like accounting errors than the “corporate greed and impunity” Mandani railed against at his presser.    

The largest part of the settlement, more than $83 million, came from a different — and entirely political — disagreement.  

Dashers are meant to be paid for what’s known as “on-call time,” periods when they are on the app but not actively making a delivery.  

But just being active in the app doesn’t equal working: The system would collapse if Dashers could claim billable hours for logging in but not actively taking delivery orders.   

The devil’s in the details, though; the city maintains DoorDash omitted on-call time that should have been paid.  

And while DoorDash had been paying for on-call time, it was doing so under a different formula, one that it considered “fair, practical and legal.”  

Instead of getting buried in a years-long legal fight and shouldering the immense cost of litigation against a city with endless taxpayer resources, the company just accepted the city’s formula.  

In fact, no court decided the settlement: The consent order concluded the administrative investigation without a single hearing or judicial determination.

As Department of Consumer and Worker Protection Commissioner Sam Levine admitted, “It’s complicated.”  

Nonetheless, Mamdani combined the admitted cases of payment failure with the disputed on-call calculation into a broad anti-capitalist narrative — and called it corporate wage theft.  

Meanwhile, workers are set to receive about $115.4 million of the total $131.5 settlement.  

The rest of the cash covers civil penalties ($11.3 million), a new monitoring program ($4.3 million) and the cost of administering the settlement ($468,000).  

That leaves City Hall with a penalty payout of roughly $16.1 million — money that won’t go to workers at all.  

Huge grants from that amount are earmarked for the Workers Justice Project — a DSA-aligned labor pressure group with deep ties to Mamdani and his mayoral campaign — and for Princeton University’s Workers’ Algorithm Observatory, to monitor a slew of new red-tape compliance measures.  

So before they cheer the Dashers’ win, New Yorkers should take a good look at the fine print.  

How will the $4.3 million in monitoring costs be spent, and how will success be measured? 

What will the city do with the $11.3 million in penalties? Mamdani hasn’t said.  

Taxpayers should also know the extent of the city resources spent on the three-year-long investigation.  

The probe included city lawyers, investigators, economists and data scientists — all paid by taxpayers.

The DCWP Research and Analytics Division spent months combing through the records on 110 million working hours and 152 million individual DoorDash transactions. 

So taxpayers funded a large-scale operation against DoorDash — and Mamdani took the credit.  

And the new mayor’s claim to the trophy must also carry a very large asterisk.  

After all, the inquiry started under his predecessor, Mayor Eric Adams, and was well underway by the time Mamdani took office.  

Mamdani can take credit for completing the race, but not for having started it.  

Nonetheless, he’s turned what he inherited — an acknowledged corporate payment failure and a newly imposed pay formula — into a $131.5 million political triumph.  

But before Mamdani cashes the check, taxpayers deserve to see the full receipt.  

Santiago Vidal Calvo is a Cities policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute.