Mamdani Secures a Multimillion-Dollar Settlement Over Delivery Worker Wage Theft
Uber Eats, HungryPanda, and Fantuan also agreed to reinstate 10,000 wrongfully deactivated workers.
Zohran Mamdani announcing more than $5 million in worker restitution and penalties secured from major restaurant delivery app companies, on January 30, 2026.
(Katie Godowski / MediaPunch / IPX via AP)New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said on Friday that his administration had secured a $5.2 million settlement with three delivery app companies that failed to pay workers minimum wage in 2023 and 2024. The settlement marks the latest action in an aggressive enforcement push against gig companies since Mamdani took office.
Mamdani announced the settlement while surrounded by delivery workers at a food hall in Long Island City. “This is the most expensive city in the United States of America, and we want to use every tool at our disposal to improve working conditions for delivery workers,” he told The Nation.
The three companies—Uber Eats, Fantuan, and HungryPanda—will pay nearly 50,000 workers who the city found were cheated out of wages when customers canceled orders. Under the city’s minimum-wage law, delivery workers must be paid for the time they’ve already spent on a delivery even if the customer cancels the order. The city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP) determined that all three companies failed to follow these rules.
DCWP also found that Uber Eats used automated rules to deactivate workers from the app even when cancellations weren’t their fault. The company does not publicly disclose the threshold for automatic deactivation. The settlement will reverse these wrongful deactivations, with Uber agreeing to reinstate up to 10,000 workers who were cut off between December 2023 and September 2024.
Al Noman, a 37-year-old delivery worker from Bangladesh who was deactivated by Uber Eats, estimated he was late delivering a few out of over a hundred orders. “I am left with no information about why I was deactivated from the app. I went to the Uber office and all they said was sorry, we cannot help you,” he said.
Uber Eats claimed it could deactivate workers like Noman because they were considered to be independent contractors rather than employees. It didn’t seem to matter that the company had decided how much they were paid for every trip and controlled when and how they could work. As independent contractors, Uber Eats owed them none of the protections that come with a real job: overtime pay, health insurance, paid sick leave, or the right to challenge their firing.
Aboubacar Ki, a 36-year-old delivery worker from Burkina Faso who has been working for Uber Eats since 2017, is part of a WhatsApp group of West African and Turkish delivery workers. He said that many in the group have been deactivated for reasons beyond their control—the app’s facial recognition system failing to recognize them after they changed their appearance, low ratings from customers who were upset about missing items the restaurant forgot to pack, or complaints from restaurants about workers waiting too long for food to be prepared.
“We go to the restaurant to pick up the order and sometimes the restaurant is busy. If the customer cancels the order when we are waiting to pick up the food, they [Uber Eats] blame us and we don’t get paid,” Ki told The Nation.
Workers at other companies face the same problems. Abdoul Karim Compaore, 32, said he was deactivated from Grubhub after a customer changed their delivery address mid-order. Workers are hoping the city can bring other companies like Grubhub to the table as well.
The city’s enforcement push is being led by DCWP Commissioner Sam Levine, who previously led the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection under Lina Khan. He said aggressive enforcement was necessary to bring companies to the table. “We have shown that we are prepared to take these companies to court.…I’m proud that this agency is not only returning full back pay, but is recovering damages and penalties to send a strong message that cheating workers will not be tolerated,” he said.
The settlement comes two weeks after DCWP filed a lawsuit seeking to shut down Motoclick, another restaurant delivery app accused of charging workers a $10 fee for canceled orders and deducting the entire cost of refunded orders from workers’ pay.
A new set of laws passed by the New York City Council last year also took effect on Monday, January 26. These laws expand minimum-pay protections for grocery delivery workers for companies like Instacart. The city’s minimum wage for app-based delivery workers is currently $21.44 per hour and will rise to $22.13 on April 1.
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“swipe left below to view more authors”Swipe →The new laws also mandate that customers should be offered a tipping option when checking out. This comes after a recent report by the DCWP, which found that moving the tipping option until after checkout reduced tips received by Uber Eats and DoorDash delivery workers by $550 million.
New York’s roughly 80,000 delivery workers—90 percent of them immigrants—complete 2.64 million deliveries every week, according to Ligia Guallpa, executive director of the Workers’ Justice Project. “We now have delivery workers who are more organized than ever, and we have a city administration that is watching, and when you break the law, there will be real consequences,” Guallpa said.
“For a very long time in our city, the norm has been for government officials to stand alongside solely those who are accumulating wealth,” Mamdani said at the announcement. “What we know is that in this moment, it is critically important that we also stand alongside those who have been working each and every day to generate it.”
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