In their crusade to remake New York’s economy, progressives on the city council are once again taking aim at Amazon. Under proposed legislation, the firm and others engaging in “last-mile” deliveries from warehouses to customers would no longer be able to use third-party contractors. The bill also adds a licensing requirement for last-mile deliveries in the city.
Though framed as a pro-labor move, the law would significantly disrupt a business model on which millions of working New Yorkers rely. It would do so in the name of “safety,” though worker-injury rates at Amazon’s delivery service partners (DSPs), which the firm contracts with to conduct last-mile deliveries, is below the national average for the industry. Indeed, visit one of the Amazon facilities and it becomes obvious that the bill’s focus on “safety” is mostly a way to drive an important employer out of New York.
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While progressives like to compare the conditions at Amazon’s facilities to sweatshops, the reality is quite different. Take Amazon’s “DAB5” last-mile facility in Red Hook, Brooklyn, the fourth such site to open in the borough. The millions of dollars poured into it and the roughly 20 similar facilities across the city were a response to the company’s growing business serving New Yorkers, creating hundreds of jobs in the process.
Roughly “80 to 90 percent of our associates live in Brooklyn,” one of the site leaders said as packages whizzed across conveyer belts, soon to be shipped off. Juan Martinez, founder of COPR Industries—one of the many DSP companies that make deliveries by e-bike and truck across New York—shows me around the site.
At DAB5, efficiency and safety are in evidence everywhere. “Our new electric trucks have 57 sensors and cameras on them,” said Martinez. “Everything is built to minimize the effort and stress, doors lock automatically, and”—he pulled up his smartphone—“I get reports of any driver-related safety incident that occurs.”
Martinez knows all his employees by name and recalls many details of their lives. Many of the young men working for him—like others in the industry—lack college degrees and might not otherwise have entered the workforce. Nevertheless, much as with other DSPs, working within a smaller team has allowed Martinez to mentor his staff in a way that would not have been possible if they had been hired directly by Amazon.
“It’s really funny,” he says. “A lot of my guys come in on days that they’re not working to just hang out. We have that kind of camaraderie.” Nevertheless, when they are working, Martinez’s staff are paid well, with wages that average $24 an hour, including extensive health insurance and a 401(k) for which Martinez says he signs everybody up, with a match of up to 6 percent.
The work is physically taxing—workers move packages and boxes all day. Yet the conditions I witnessed, as we stopped along the routes and spoke to workers on e-bikes and in trucks, were a far cry from the nightmare environments alleged about some Amazon facilities.
At a later stop, Bryant, one of Martinez’s employees, explained that he made “a whole lot more” compared with his old job. “There’s only three of us in my family, so I have to do what’s best for my family. And it took me a while to get here, but I’m living the dream because I wake up every day,” he said.
If anything, Amazon’s profitability, plus a competitive labor market, has pushed up wages and encouraged investment in new e-bikes and vehicles with enhanced safety features used throughout the facility. This is reflected in nationwide data: injury rates for courier and delivery workers have decreased since 2003, despite significant growth in the volume of packages processed.
Safety starts at sites like “DYN7,” a state-of-the-art training center for employees that just opened in Brooklyn. “Workers start with two eight-hour days of training” that includes driving simulators, classrooms, and mock loading bays to learn the proper movements, said Martinez. “That’s just the initial training. Then you have on-road training, and we coach and train our teams every day.” That training, he said, goes above and beyond any legal requirement.
“[We] take steps to make sure that our employees are as best prepared as possible so they’re ready to deliver,” he said. As we exit the training center, another employee runs over to hand us yellow vests to ensure we’re visible.
So if Amazon is apparently so safety conscious, why yet another bill to try to make it still “safer”? The most likely explanation: the same ideological prejudice against big corporations that caused the company to withdraw its plans for a second headquarters in Queens. Adding to this is significant pressure from the teamsters’ unions, for whom a single employer would present a much simpler unionization path, and from politicians aligned with those unions.
Yet the bill is unlikely to improve the prospects of Brooklynites like those who work at DAB5 or DYN7. The likely outcome will be to discourage future investment in facilities within the five boroughs, as companies turn instead to nearby counties, from which deliveries could be shipped in by truck.
The bill’s ultimate effect could be to eliminate more than 10,000 jobs in the city, according to analysis by AKRF, a firm retained by the Five Borough Jobs Campaign. Indeed, Walmart already operates this way, owing to stringent zoning rules that make a physical presence in the city economically unfeasible.
Some 2.5 million packages get delivered in the five boroughs each day—strong evidence that New Yorkers like using e-commerce sites like Amazon. Disrupting its business model in a way that will drive up costs and shift operations elsewhere will have a tangible negative effect on New Yorkers’ ability to access goods affordably and conveniently.
In short, the proposed law is unlikely to improve safety. It has a much better chance of scaring off jobs and driving up costs for New Yorkers.