Since before his inauguration, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has made it known that, when it comes to the gig economy, a new sheriff was coming to town. Now, just months into his administration, he has launched a citywide crackdown on gig companies. Though promoted as a defense of workers, his campaign runs against what many of them want and need.
Mamdani began by appointing Samuel Levine to lead the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. Levine, a veteran of the Federal Trade Commission under the Biden administration, was a key player in FTC Chair Lina Khan’s aggressive antibusiness tenure. (See “Khan Job,” Spring 2026.) The DCWP has since become the primary vehicle for Mamdani’s anti-gig push. Declaring a “New Era of Accountability,” the mayor and Levine have promised stricter enforcement of gig-related laws, including the city’s 2023 minimum wage for app-based food-delivery workers and a newer rule requiring apps to display tipping prompts with a default suggestion of 10 percent.
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Right on cue, the administration launched a lawsuit against the gig firm Motoclick for allegedly stealing worker wages. The DCWP also announced a $5 million settlement with Uber Eats, Hungry Panda, and Fantuan for violating the 2023 minimum-wage law.
It’s hard to evaluate these moves without full access to the facts. But there’s more to the story of the Uber Eats settlement than the administration suggested. In the fine print, the city noted that Uber Eats had been “mostly compliant” with the minimum-wage law and that the company had “incurred the wage debt only in weeks where workers had a delivery canceled.”
During those weeks, workers reportedly did not receive the compensation that Uber Eats owed them, and some drivers were subsequently deactivated under the app’s automated rules governing canceled orders. Whether this resulted from an algorithmic error or another issue remains unclear. Uber Eats has said, however, that it was informed of the pay shortfall in August 2024, before Mamdani had even announced his mayoral candidacy, and agreed at that time to take corrective action and “pay more than the amount owed.”
Mamdani trumpeted the settlement anyway. “This is the most expensive city in the United States of America,” he said, “and we want to use every tool at our disposal to improve working conditions for delivery workers.”
But the mayor’s anti-gig push is raising costs for New Yorkers while failing to reflect what gig workers actually want. The minimum wage for delivery workers increased food-delivery costs in Gotham by 10 percent after it took effect. Instacart has since announced a $5.99 regulatory response fee, following the extension of the delivery minimum wage to groceries. (The charge already applied to restaurant orders.)
Delivery drivers saw their tips plummet by nearly 50 percent after the minimum-wage law kicked in. This aligns with results elsewhere: economic research has shown zero long-term growth in driver take-home pay in places like Seattle after that city enacted a food-delivery minimum wage.
Many gig workers were effectively iced out of the market after the implementation of the new minimum. To control labor costs, companies limited the number of drivers on their platforms, with Uber Eats reporting a waiting list of 27,000 New Yorkers who sought to use the app to deliver food but could not. Gig platforms have also turned to so-called arranged scheduling, in which even already-active drivers get locked out of the app during certain periods. Why? Higher wage mandates push gig companies to operate more like traditional employers, limiting how many workers can be on the clock at one time. If too many log on, the firms risk paying for idle or underutilized labor.
Arranged scheduling cuts directly against what gig workers value most: flexibility. More than 60 percent cite it as the main reason they chose this work, and few are interested in traditional, prescheduled jobs. They’re also more concerned about the lack of benefits than about wage rates.
These realities underscore the wrongheadedness of Mamdani’s anti-gig campaign. A better approach would preserve flexible hours while expanding access to benefits. One promising model is a portable benefits system, in which workers and companies contribute to SEP IRA–style accounts that can be used to purchase health insurance, paid leave, or retirement plans.
Numerous states—red and blue alike, from Tennessee to Maryland to Pennsylvania—have enacted portable-benefits systems for gig workers in recent years. These models preserve the self-selected scheduling flexibility that workers prize and avoid leaving tens of thousands of would-be drivers stranded on waiting lists instead of earning income.
Mayor Mamdani’s desire to help gig workers may be genuine, but that goal is likelier to be achieved through policies far different from his own.
