by Charles Gasparino
A lot of New Yorkers seem to appreciate Amazon’s services – that is, unless you’re talking about Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Socialists of America and a seemingly unlikely player in this clown show, the Teamsters, On The Money has learned.
There’s a good chance, I am told, that the Seattle-based e-tailing giant pulls out of New York if this gang of three (or shall we call them the three stooges) has its way and the City Council passes a local ordinance that would ban the online retailer and similar businesses from using subcontractors for its deliveries.
First, let’s be real: Amazon has become an essential utility for many New Yorkers, as it has for shoppers nationwide. It’s why even left-wing class-warfare freaks like Joy Behar of “The View” profess “love” for the online retailer, even if she disdains its billionaire founder Jeff Bezos for, well, being a billionaire.
One lefty gripe is that Bezos should pay more taxes, even as he employs over 1 million Americans. Another is that Amazon is using small businesses that employ gig workers to deliver its packages.
There are about 40 small businesses who perform this task in NYC. They pay decent wages to their workers and are required to provide healthcare. But they’re not unionized, which somehow makes it exploitative. That makes Mayor Mamdani a hater, ditto for his fellow travelers in the DSA and now the Teamsters.
Full disclosure: I’m a supporter of unions, the son of a union ironworker. I grew up with my fair share of Teamsters, and know the typical blue-collar political archetype. It veers between center left and center right but comes nowhere close to the DSA lunatic fringe.
That’s why it struck me at least initially as weird that Teamster boss Sean O’Brien – a blue-collar Bostonian who spoke at the GOP’s 2024 convention with a tacit endorsement of Donald Trump – showed up recently to rally with DSA members and lefty city officials to tout the new law as a game changer for workers.
Look deeper and you can see why: O’Brien is looking for union members, and if you believe his critics, he doesn’t care how he gets there. Past efforts to squeeze more money out of businesses like UPS for its members have led to new contracts but also automation and layoffs.
Yellow Corporation, a trucking company, blamed its bankruptcy on the Teamsters for refusing to agree on a restructuring that would have cut costs, salaries and jobs but was better than its ultimate liquidation.
The reasons for the bill’s support by Mamdani and among the emerging DSA wing of the state’s Democratic Party are more obvious: These are crypto Marxists (and some not so crypto) with little understanding of real economics and a blind devotion to the weird stuff they learned in college.
They also can’t add.
The company has said that its delivery network is built on a fast and low-cost business model. This bill — and the pressure O’Brien is putting on — would make it impossible to sustain that model. These tactics O’Brien has used to cost jobs elsewhere. It would cost each of its local customers an average of $660 a year, Amazon says. That’s a lot of money for working-class consumers in a city where everything already costs above the national average because of our warped regulatory system.
That’s why Amazon has plans to begin a vast relocation of its delivery services to New Jersey, costing as many as 10,000 NYC jobs. Those jobs would impact minorities the most, which you would think is something the DSA might care about.
Reps for the Teamsters and the mayor had no immediate comment.
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