Mamdani Hails Landmark DoorDash Deal as ‘Largest Settlement for Food Delivery Workers Ever’

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday touted a settlement with food delivery app DoorDash as a "landmark win" for workers.

During a press event, Mamdani announced DoorDash had agreed to pay $131 million—of which $115 million will go directly to short-changed workers—in what he described as "the largest settlement for food delivery workers ever secured in American municipal history."

The mayor said that DoorDash's systematic exploitation and underpayment of its workers showed it profited by using "greed as a business model."

"Two months ago, Tony Xu, the CEO of DoorDash, gave business owners a piece of advice," Mamdani said. "A CEO, he said, has to take the greedy algorithm and keep going all the way to see if there is more. In computer science, a greedy algorithm is one that makes the most optimized, best short-term outcome at every step, and never weighs the consequences."

Mamdani explained that DoorDash for years "failed to count every hour worked by deliver workers," emphasizing that this was "not an accidental rounding error or a mistake."

The mayor touted the work done by the New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP), which analyzed more than 150 million DoorDash payments and determined that the company had "underpaid more than 260,000 delivery workers across New York City" over a four-year period.

"After years of corporate greed and impunity, we are holding DoorDash to account," Mamdani said. "City Hall will not sit idly by while a megacorporation that made nearly a billion dollars in profits last year rips off the working people who keep our city moving."

A Tuesday report in The New York Times noted that, in addition to making a $131 million payout, DoorDash has also agreed to allow closer monitoring of its payment methods to ensure that its workers get what they are owed.

While the company defended its payment calculation model as "fair, practical, and legal," it also acknowledged it made mistakes that led to some workers not getting everything they had earned.

"We screwed up,” DoorDash said, “and our mistakes meant some NYC Dashers were underpaid or paid late."

DCWP Commissioner Samuel Levine told the Times that the city's settlement with the delivery app "sends a strong message that we are in a new era of enforcement in New York," adding that "we will not tolerate nickeling and diming New York City workers."

Melanie D'Arrigo, executive director of Campaign for New York Healthcare, said in a Tuesday social media post that the DoorDash settlement showed the importance of electing leaders willing to take on corporate power.

"Just in case you were wondering why DoorDash was spending so much money to elect Andrew Cuomo and oppose Zohran Mamdani," D'Arrigo observed, "DoorDash now has to pay $115 million to the workers it stole wages from."