This op-ed is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
Last week, New York City announced a groundbreaking $131.5 million settlement with DoorDash. The largest such resolution in city history, the case involved over 260,000 workers who were paid late and in some cases not paid at all.
It also raises the question: If these underpayments happened in New York City, where DoorDash knew it was under scrutiny, what’s happening to gig workers everywhere else when no one is watching?
This case underscores the urgent need for far greater investment in protecting workers’ rights everywhere, and the upcoming midterms, with the fresh starts they will hopefully bring, offer an opportunity for state and local leaders to take concrete action.
Some context for the recent case: New York City, along with Seattle, is one of only two cities that sets a specific minimum wage for DoorDash and other gig delivery workers. Passed in 2023, the law survived a legal challenge from DoorDash and its peers. The city has an agency that began working immediately to implement the statute, partnering with Los Deliveristas Unidos, the worker group that pushed for the pay floor.
And all of that was before the new Mayor, Zohran Mamdani, took office. Just two weeks into 2026, Sam Levine, Mamdani’s Commissioner of the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, announced a “compliance blitz” on the law, warning DoorDash and others by name.
No one can say DoorDash wasn’t on notice.
I enforced state labor laws in New York for nearly two decades, and since leaving government, I’ve spent nearly a decade working with state and local labor enforcement agencies nationwide. I’m deeply familiar with the cat-and-mouse world of scofflaw employers and the valiant but underfunded teams trying to catch them.
To me, this case is eye-popping not because of the dollar amount, but because of the sheer brazenness of a multi-national corporation that knew it was being watched. DoorDash says the mistakes were unintentional: “Simply put, we screwed up.”
But they can make a vegetarian burrito with mild sauce and no sour cream appear at my door in thirty minutes flat, along with a laptop and Timberland boots. DoorDash has immense technological savvy, and when mega-corporations actually care about something they generally try to do it right.
Last week’s settlement should be understood in a broader context. It’s not just an example of a new socialist mayor fighting for workers. Rather, it’s part of several under-the-radar trends of recent decades: misclassification of workers as independent contractors, high rates of wage theft, starved enforcement agencies, and an upsurge of action in some cities and states. The upcoming midterm elections offer the possibility of change, especially at the state and local levels, if new leaders rise to the challenge.
One initial question about this case might be, Why did New York City even set a minimum wage for gig delivery workers, when there’s a state and federal minimum wage? The answer: DoorDash treats their workers as “independent contractors,” and our workplace laws apply only to “employees.” This means DoorDash and its peers take the position that each delivery worker is running their own totally independent very small business. It’s ludicrous on its face, but they and others have gotten away with it for years. As businesses realize they can save serious money by avoiding employer obligations, this model has spread to restaurants, warehouses, and even nursing.
This phenomenon is known by the misleadingly benign term “misclassification of workers” and it doesn’t just happen at gig companies. San Diego County recently sued five national sushi companies for allegedly underpaying and misclassifying the sushi chefs in our neighborhood supermarkets. The Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office recently recovered almost $1.5 million from a Dunkin Donuts franchisee that contracted with a staffing agency to hire 100 “independent contractors” in over 20 locations. They managed the store, made the coffee, and yes, made the donuts.
But even when workers are treated as employees with rights, those rights are violated with stunning frequency. A 2014 estimate from the Economic Policy Institute places wage theft at $50 billion per year, more than other forms of theft. The Cleveland Federal Reserve last month reported workers who experience wage theft lose around $95 per week, almost $5,000 per year. How many bags of groceries or months or rent would that cover for a struggling family?
Despite these high rates of violations, federal enforcement agencies have been starved for resources for decades, and it’s getting worse, with low staffing leading to low enforcement. The pursuit of wage and hour enforcement cases by the U.S. Department of Labor declined by 97% during the first year of the current Trump administration.
The situation cries out for state and local action. The good news here is that the last decade has seen passage of new workers’ rights laws in many states, along with entirely new players entering the field, like local governments, state attorney general offices and district attorneys.
Even so, this positive motion is, so far, limited to blue jurisdictions only — but not even all of them, and even where there are efforts, the resources are usually too limited to deter violations.
As the midterms approach, it’s worth asking: What will all these candidates do for working people, beyond offering platitudes about the dignity of work? It’s not only Congress in play: dozens of states will also elect governors and attorneys general, alongside countless local contests. No matter what level of office they occupy, those who are elected will have real power that they can use to make working people’s lives better.
DoorDash workers, and all workers, deserve fair treatment and dignity on the job. Being paid on time, and being paid at all, should never even be in question.
If workers for just this one company in this one city were owed $131.5 million dollars, just imagine how much workers are owed everywhere else. And then imagine if we actually did something about it.
