Amazon has vowed to close more than a dozen warehouses and shed thousands of workers across New York City over a labor bill being pushed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani — and the e-commerce giant is likely to make good on the threat if the controversial legislation is enacted, industry experts told The Post.
The Delivery Protection Act would force Amazon to directly hire upwards of 5,000 delivery workers citywide who are currently employed by third-party contractors. Proponents say the legislation will increase workers’ pay and improve safety conditions at Amazon and other delivery firms including FedEx and DoorDash.
But Amazon doesn’t directly employ delivery workers anywhere else in the country — and has a history of fiercely resisting efforts to change its policies in the US and abroad. The result, according to experts, could be not only that those 5,000 delivery jobs move out of the city, but also that Amazon shutters its 15 last-mile warehouses in the Big Apple and fires the additional 2,000 workers that staff them.
Early last year, Amazon closed seven warehouses in Quebec near Montreal amid a labor fight involving one of its last-mile facilities. The union, Confédération des syndicats nationaux (CSN), had organized the 300 workers at a warehouse in the town of Laval.
By March 2025, some 1,900 Canadians across seven warehouses and 2,800 delivery contractors for those facilities had lost their jobs.
“Amazon will retaliate, because it has to send a firm message to the rest of the country that ‘If you mess with us, this is what will happen,’” said Marc Wulfraat, president and founder of Montreal-based logistics consulting firm, MWPVL International.
“When you look at Amazon’s global operations, they close buildings left, right and center when there is union activity.”
According to real estate listings, the Montreal facilities are now vacant, with Amazon still paying rent on more than 1.6 million square feet of space that it spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build, according to Wulfraat. At least two facilities are being offered as subleases.
The Delivery Protection Act — first introduced a year ago by Queens Council Member Tiffany Cabán and reintroduced in 2026 — has strong support in the City Council with some 34 co-signers. But several, including Speaker Julie Menin, are “uncomfortable” with potential job losses, a source close to negotiations said.
“This bill will have to pass in some form,” particularly since the mayor supports it, the source told The Post, adding that the final result may make “both sides unhappy.”
Compromises that have been discussed include allowing independent contractors to continue to perform deliveries while requiring Amazon to provide more safety guarantees for workers, the source said. No vote has been scheduled.
Industry experts say parallels between Quebec and New York can’t be ignored, even as Amazon employs directly or indirectly more than 12,000 hourly workers in New York — more than twice as many as it did in Quebec.
Those include the 2,000 workers that staff last-mile warehouses and 5,000 more to deliver the goods. The Delivery Protection Act wouldn’t affect 5,500 workers at Amazon’s giant JFK8 fulfillment center on Staten Island, who voted to unionize in 2022 — a first at an Amazon US facility — but who still lack a collective bargaining agreement.
While Amazon employs unionized workers in Europe, it has made headlines since the pandemic battling unions in the US. It’s now locked in litigation over allegedly hardball tactics it has used to fight labor organization in Bessemer, Ala., and Staten Island.
In April, the National Labor Relations Board ordered Amazon to the bargaining table with the Teamsters in Staten Island, but Amazon has filed lawsuits questioning the legitimacy of the NLRB.
“Amazon will say or do whatever it takes to deny workers stronger rights and wages and abdicate its responsibilities for its own employees,” the Teamsters said in a statement.
The risks posed by the Delivery Protection Act are not lost on the 40 independent companies that employ the 5,000 delivery workers in New York City.
“Look at what happened in Quebec,” Kris Basmagy, owner of DashWave Delivery, which handles Amazon’s deliveries on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, told The Post. “There was pressure on Amazon’s model, and it pulled out.”
Basmagy, who employs 150 delivery workers, added that nothing is stopping Amazon from replacing its New York City facilities with some of the “warehouses being built along the New Jersey Turnpike.”
Amazon is still tied up in litigation in Quebec, where it denies that it closed its warehouses because of CSN’s organizing activity. The union filed a complaint with Quebec’s labor tribunal, but even if it proves that Amazon violated labor laws, Amazon faces at most a fine and potential consumer backlash, according to a CBC News report.
A class action lawsuit filed by an Amazon Prime customer in Quebec in February 2025 claims that the warehouse closures slowed Amazon’s delivery times beyond the one- and two-day guarantee for Prime service — with some deliveries instead taking as long as four to six days.
In May, a Quebec court ruled that the case can proceed. Still, plaintiffs who are seeking refunds admit the disruption only lasted about two months, according to the complaint. Amazon says service hasn’t suffered since a large Canadian logistics company, IntelCom, took over its Quebec deliveries.
“Then they got their act together and stopped the delays,” said Saro Turner, a partner in the law firm Slater Vecchio, which filed the suit.
In New York, Amazon maintains that delivery times and prices for customers would increase if it closed its warehouses. New York is “fundamentally different” from Quebec, where Amazon operated “far fewer sites,” according to Amazon spokesperson Steve Kelly.
The company bankrolled a study by AKFR showing that the Delivery Protection Act would cost New Yorkers an extra $664 extra a year — or about $5.20 per package. That figure covers deliveries made by other companies, including FedEx and Doordash.
“New York City is one of the largest and most complex delivery regions in the country,” Kelly said in a statement. “It’s best served by a network of local small businesses deeply embedded in their communities and leveraging our operations infrastructure.”
Amazon deliveries in New York would slow permanently if it closed its last-mile facilities in the city, according to a source with knowledge of Amazon’s operations. Same-day deliveries and those that occur within hours of placing an order would take the biggest hit. The number of items that fall under the Prime promise would also shrink, this source said.
“There are a lot of same-day and same-morning deliveries in the city” that could arrive the next day, the source said.
Amazon’s last-mile facilities in Brooklyn and Queens include one in Red Hook at 270 Richards St. and another in Maspeth at 55-15 Grand Ave. Last-mile warehouses in Manhattan include an 87,000-square-foot facility at 706 11th Ave., according to a report on safety issues from New York City Comptroller Mark Levine.
“Amazon wouldn’t blink about shutting down the 15 facilities in New York City if it felt that the legislation was a threat to its business model,” said Brittain Ladd, a logistics and retail consultant and former Amazon executive. “This is about a model that could be copied in other cities.”
The delivery companies say they are the collateral damage in this struggle.
“There is a laser focus on punishing Amazon no matter what the repercussions might be, what it does to us as business owners, fathers and husbands,” Basmagy said. “It’s as if we no longer exist.”
WGA Transit, which has actively recruited formerly incarcerated and homeless workers to deliver Amazon packages in Harlem, will be forced out of business if the Delivery Protection Act is enacted in its current form, owner Joe Artus told The Post.
“I have a 21-month-old daughter,” Artus told The Post. “If this thing passes, there is no way for my company to exist or to keep my 189 employees.”
