NEW YORK PAYS DELIVERY WORKERS MOST AND THE APPS STILL LEAD THE FOOD STAMP ROLLS

New York City set the highest delivery pay floor in the country. As of the first pay period on or after April 1, the apps owe $22.13 an hour before tips, and tips sit on top of that, never inside it. In the same stretch, a federal audit put the companies dispatching those workers at the top of the nation's food assistance rolls. Nobody is lying. Both things are the case.

Before the rule, app delivery workers in this city averaged $5.39 an hour before tips. That figure comes from the city's own study, the one the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection built out of app data, worker surveys, and testimony, and it is the number that made the rest possible.

The rate landed in June 2023. The apps sued. A state court let it take effect that September, and DCWP started enforcing in December 2023. It went to $19.56 in April 2024, to $21.44 in April 2025, and to $22.13 this April on an inflation adjustment of 3.2 percent. By last spring the city counted more than $700 million returned to over 60,000 delivery workers. By January the count was $1.2 billion.

Then it widened. On January 26 the grocery apps came under the same floor, Instacart included, after the City Council overrode a veto. Apps now have to pay within seven calendar days, hand over an itemized statement showing how the pay was calculated, and put a tip option in front of the customer at checkout with a suggestion of at least ten percent. Several companies went to federal court arguing the tipping prompt was compelled speech. On January 22, Judge George Daniels declined to stop it. DCWP followed with a lawsuit against one company and compliance warnings to more than sixty others, Instacart, DoorDash, Grubhub and Uber among them. The mayor's line on it was that the city has "zero tolerance for corporate abuse, deceptive practices".

That is not a city asleep at the wheel. That is the most aggressive delivery pay enforcement in the United States.

The Government Accountability Office published a report this summer, requested by Senator Bernie Sanders, looking at which employers have the most workers enrolled in SNAP and Medicaid. It drew on data from eleven states holding close to a fifth of the country.

In 2020, the same exercise found Walmart and McDonald's at the top. In 2025 it found the delivery and rideshare platforms there instead. Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Grubhub and Instacart together displaced the largest private employer in America on the food stamp list. Amazon's own enrollment nearly tripled over the same period. Sanders put it as taxpayers being forced to "subsidize the starvation wages of large corporations".

Read the fine print before anybody builds a headline on it. The GAO looked at eleven states, and New York was not broken out on its own. There is no published count of how many of this city's delivery workers are on SNAP. What the report establishes is the category, not the borough. That distinction matters, and the people who will argue with this piece will reach for it first.

Here is the part that should make people angry, and it has nothing to do with an hourly rate.

In May 1999 the state created the Black Car Fund. Coverage started that January after. The design is elegant and it has held for twenty six years: the passenger pays a small surcharge on the fare, the base collects it and remits monthly, and the driver gets workers compensation without anybody having to call him an employee. No enrollment. Get hurt on the job, you are covered. There is a death benefit. There is a weekly disability floor. A separate benefits program layers on vision, dental, telemedicine and mental health counseling for drivers who sign up, and it is free to them.

It started with limousines and corporate cars. It grew. Uber, Lyft and Via drivers came under it, and today the fund runs past five hundred member bases and well over 100,000 covered drivers across the state.

Now look at who cannot get in. Eligibility runs through a for-hire vehicle base and a passenger fare. The courier carrying your order up four flights has no passenger and no fare. There is no base to remit anything. He is outside the statute, and he is outside it because of how the statute was written, not because anybody sat in a room and voted him out.

That is the mechanism. New York solved the exact problem, in law, for one set of gig workers, using money that came from customers rather than from the platforms. It has never extended the same architecture to the people carrying the food.

A pay rate buys the hour. It does not buy the emergency room visit after a driver turns into you on Broadway. It does not replace a $2,000 e-bike lifted off a rack. It does not cover the six weeks you cannot ride.

It is getting harder in the other direction too. The 2025 federal tax law attached work requirements to Medicaid, eighty hours a month of work or school. Gig work counts. Proving it is another matter when the hours live inside three different app interfaces, no pay stub totals them, and there is no supervisor to sign anything.

So the argument in the comments, the one about whether $22.13 is generous or insulting, is the wrong argument. The floor is real and the city fought for it. The gap underneath it is also real, and the blueprint for closing it has been sitting in the Executive Law since Pataki signed it.

Somebody has to write the bikes in.

SEE WHO GOT LEFT OUT OF THE FUND

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