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…
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