With the clock ticking toward the Nov. 3 midterm elections, Republicans face deep voter concerns about President Donald Trump‘s seeming indifference to affordability issues. The perception exists even though sustained price hikes occurred between his nonconsecutive terms — a key reason voters returned him to the White House.
The good news is that there is zero evidence Democrats are taking the inflation issue any more seriously. And if New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani‘s nearly eight-month tenure is any indication, the party’s ascendant socialist wing is actively committed to making the problem worse.
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After Mamdani passed his infamous rent freeze on a million housing units across New York City and proposed his unprecedented tax on pieds-a-terre, rents in Manhattan have skyrocketed to an all-time high of $6,655 per month. That corresponds with the city’s overall vacancy rate plummeting to its lowest point in nearly 60 years.
And despite going forward with government-run grocery stores in the name of affordability, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has found that the price index for food at home in the New York metro area (nearly half of which is composed of the actual city proper) has risen by 2.1% since Mamdani took office. That’s nearly twice as fast as the increase in grocery prices nationally.
Now, it should come as little surprise that Mamdani’s next obsession is Amazon. And not to help the e-commerce giant even further slash prices, but specifically to bolster them.
Mamdani is promoting the Delivery Protection Act, a proposed New York City Council bill that would push major companies to hire employees directly rather than relying on contractors. The firms counter that this will raise prices and slow service.
They’re right — the proposal, if it became law, would immediately raise prices for consumers. It would also jeopardize thousands of subcontractors’ incomes.
Amazon’s business model has a lot to do with it. Amazon employees at a fulfillment center find, package, and send your items to a sortation center or “carrier facility,” where they’re usually sorted by another set of Amazon employees and handed off to contracted delivery drivers. These contractors often take packages to a final delivery station, where Amazon employees again sort and distribute packages for the last few miles of delivery, handing them off to contracted workers. These workers are either Amazon Flex drivers, who, like Uber drivers or Taskrabbit movers, are individual 1099 gig workers using their own vehicles and setting their own schedules, or they are W-2 employees of subcontracted companies called Delivery Service Partners.
If you think that the DPA targets the former, surprisingly, you would be wrong. Instead, the DPA would require Amazon to directly employ the delivery drivers who are already W-2 employees of DSPs.
According to Amazon, DSP employees earn an average of $24 per hour, and the DSPs themselves, 25% of which are owned by black or Hispanic operators in New York City, are required to offer health insurance and 20% more paid time off than the city’s minimum. Because the DSPs are hyperlocal companies, they both know the minutiae of the city’s delivery routes and allow more scheduling flexibility than the nation’s second-largest private employer would be able to.
In practice, Mamdani, who claims to loathe oligarchy and big business, is asking Amazon to destroy over 40 small businesses and subsume their economic power. If the Democratic Party wanted to pass a national version of the DPA, thousands of DSPs would be outlawed and hundreds of thousands of DSP employees would either lose their jobs or be hired by Amazon. The Teamsters have been enthusiastically endorsing the bill specifically because, while 40-something employers would be difficult to collectively bargain against, DSP workers would be much easier to organize once within Amazon.
The cost of Amazon being forced to internalize operations that they decided the DSP would handle more efficiently would be passed down to consumers, or, if those costs were too astronomical, Amazon would move all of its last-mile delivery operations out of the city and into the wider metropolitan area, which would still increase costs and delivery times. The increased costs to consumers matter more than whatever third-order effects happen to the delivery drivers, even if Mamdani’s delusions actually were to come true. After all, 70% of voters polled by Navigator Research say they prefer lower costs over higher wages because we are a nation of consumers, not of organized labor.
MAMDANI’S FAVORABILITY IN NEW YORK CONTINUES TO CLIMB
But just as Mamdani’s rent freeze is leading to higher rents and his government grocery stores have coincided with higher grocery inflation than the national average, the DPA will not lead to higher wages for former DSP employees or higher employment numbers, and that’s not really the point. The purpose is the pain on Amazon and pain for the consumers, who have relied on Amazon to make their lives more affordable and convenient throughout a decade when the government, especially with the pandemic and inflation, has actively worked to make their lives worse.
Republicans may face an uphill battle with voters who overwhelmingly prioritize the cost-of-living crisis. But if new left-wing superstar Mamdani is any indication, the Democratic Party won’t fare much better.
Tiana Lowe Doescher (@TianaTheFirst) is an economics columnist for the Washington Examiner.
