Uber, GrubHub among delivery apps suing NYC over delivery worker wages

Uber Eats, DoorDash and GrubHub are suing New York City in a bid to pump the brakes on a new law that sets minimum wage requirements for delivery workers.

The regulations, announced by Mayor Eric Adams in June, would have sharply increased workers’ take-home pay to at least $17.96 per hour plus tips by July 12, and at least $19.96 an hour by 2025. The wages were still well short of what advocates and elected leaders hoped when they passed a law mandating the minimum wage in 2021.

But Uber claimed in its lawsuit that the new rules would harm delivery workers, inflate costs for consumers by at least $6 on average and ultimately shrink take-out orders from restaurants by more than a third.

“The rule is bad policy that will eliminate work and reduce tipping while forcing the remaining couriers to deliver orders faster," said Uber spokesperson Josh Gold in a statement. "It must be paused before damaging restaurants, consumers and the couriers it purports to protect."

According to a report from the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, most workers currently make well below the city’s minimum wage of $15 an hour — about $11.12 with tips, and as little as $4.03 an hour without tips.

The app and its peers, in separate lawsuits that were heard together this week, are seeking a temporary restraining order from state Supreme Court in Manhattan to stop the plan from taking effect.

City Comptroller Brad Lander , who led the charge for the minimum wage as a City Councilmember, said the suit was just the latest attempt by app-based companies to shortchange workers.

“No surprise that Grubhub, DoorDash, and Uber are out to extract every penny they can from the delivery workers whose labor they rely on: that’s the gig business model,” Lander in a statement. “Gig companies have sued New York City repeatedly: to block accessibility requirements for people-with-disabilities, to reduce cruising time, and to prevent the minimum pay requirement for for-hire drivers that became law in 2019.

He added that the driver wage mandate didn’t harm ridership and the “delivery-worker minimum pay law will work just as well.”

The Workers Justice Project began efforts to organize the city’s approximately 60,000 app-based delivery workers in early 2020, as delivery orders soared during the pandemic. Now, the collective known as Los Deliveristas Unidos advocates for regulations that protect the workers’ rights and make their jobs easier.

In response to the lawsuit, Los Deliveristas Unidos posted photos on their Facebook page of CEOs and founders connected to GrubHub and DoorDash.

“This little angel has $1.4 billion in his bank account, and he doesn’t want to pay $17,” read a post in Spanish above a photo of Jitse Groen, CEO of the company Just Eat Takeaway.com which owns GrubHub. “Poor guy, he’s going to be poor.”