Since some other people are posting links about DoorDash, here’s one: https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/09/mayor-mamdani...

From the NYT version of this story:

> DoorDash said the median payment to be returned to workers amounts to around $48. > City officials said about 700 workers are owed more than $10,000 each; more than 27,000 workers are owed more than $1,000; and more than 4,000 workers are owed more than $5,000.

DoorDash also spent (from what I can tell) (1+1.4+1.8) million dollars to campaign against Mamdani.

▲

ashf023 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

DoorDash also charges a $2 "regulatory response fee" on every order in NYC. It has a little "info" icon that basically says "look at what these overzealous regulations like absolute minimum of workers rights costs you!"

▲

nonethewiser 5 hours ago | parent [-]

To be more specific, they added this fee in response to a NYC regulation mandating a minimum $22.13 for delivery workers. [0]

There is debate about whether or not Doordash needed to do this, if they are just being vindictive etc. But what we do know is that regulation came at a cost to NYC consumers. And it wasn't just Door Dash. Uber Eats added a $2 fee and Instacart added a $5.99 fee. New Yorkers can determine for themselves if they want to pay higher prices to ensure higher wages.

[0] https://about.doordash.com/en-us/news/changes-to-fees-nyc

	▲	johnnyanmac 33 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I in california have all kinds of "service fees" too. Despite them successfully campaigning to make sure delivery drivers here do not count as employees. Don't fall for the spin. This is just an added cost they always wanted to add. If Mamdami wasn't in NYC, they would just call it a "service Fee" or "delivery fee" (which is different from the Driver's Tip) like they do here. Or make up a anew fee altogether.

▲

toomuchtodo 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

NYC recovered $131M in unpaid wages from DoorDash.

https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/09/mayor-mamdani...

Culper Research released a report about a year ago indicating a large component of DoorDash labor is very likely undocumented workers (which is not meant to be derogatory towards these workers, but signal that DoorDash needs labor willing to take gig payments on offer to make the model work).

https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/cc91fda7-4669-4d1b-81ce-a0b...

I don't think the platform economics are working post ZIRP ("zero interest rate policy") as wages rise and margins compress, would need more data to understand what forward curves look like.

▲

jmyeet 10 hours ago | parent [-]

I love the Mamdani DoorDash story because it demonstrates that government can work. When it doesn't, it's because it's made not to work or the people in charge have absolutely no interest in doing anything than feathering their own nests.

Back during Covid, Congress passed and Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act ("IRA"), which actually did a couple of good things.

One of those was the Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax ("CAMT"). For non-Americans, AMTs are a weird thing where Congress basically gives up and decides the tax code is too complex so they give up and say whatever your deductions are, if the AMT produces a higher amount, that's what you have to pay. Every complexity is somebody's special interest so repealing them can be hard. It's kind of why the carried interest tax credit has never been repealed.

Repealing it, as Republicans tried to do, is hard to do because the counter-messaging is "well if the corporate tax rate is 21%, why do you care about repealing a minimum of 15%?". Everybody understands that companies through various tax schemes aren't paying 21% but you can't say that.

But the one I want to talk about is the 10 year plan to increase IRS funding to update incredibly outdated systems and increase enforcement. This was a good measure. And you can tell because the Republican Party lost their minds. They fairly successively propagandized it as the IRS hiring 80,000 agents to go after Joe Q. Citizen. No, it was enforcement against the ultra-wealthy and corporations. So it was killed in 3 years under the guise of "saving money" as well as not persecuting average citizens (which it was never going to do).

It's particularly stupid because money spent on IRS enforcement pays for itself. It's been estimated every $1 spent recovers $7. It pays for itself. But there was no counter-messaging and Republicans could push it through under reconiliation.

Compare that to the 4 year $175 billion increase in ICE funding.

▲

johsole 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> No, it was enforcement against the ultra-wealthy and corporations

This is how income tax was sold to the American public. When it originally started it really only did effect the top earners, but as the years rolled on and inflation happened it impacted more and more people. The reality is these tools that target only the 'wealthy', if they're successful are used to target everyone.

	▲	triceratops 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		As the decades went by, people wanted the government to do more and more things and it needed more and more money to do it. Look how many more things the federal government does today versus when income tax was first introduced. "Inflation brought everyone into the taxable income brackets" has very little to do with it. A significant portion of the population still doesn't make enough income to pay federal tax. Taxes are unpopular. The government has no reason to "target everyone" because that's an easy way to get voted out.
	▲	myersj 8 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Why do you think more IRS agents would suddenly start "targeting" people who take the standard deduction (87% of all tax returns [1]) and if they did, why do you think that would matter? This is a nonsense slippery slope. 1 - https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-tax-stats-at-a-...
	▲	toomuchtodo 8 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		No, the problem was that wealth become concentrated in capital, and we don't tax wealth. Wealth can be leveraged as power without a taxable event. This is the problem. Capital is capturing the largest piece of the pie as ever, and isn't taxed effectively. This is also why California is voting on a wealth tax. Wealth Inequality in America drawn to scale - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50270764 - October 2026 The 'Buy, Borrow and Die' Wealth Strategy Has Become a $5T Market - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50253630 - October 2026 Warren Buffett has been saying this for years, that his secretary was taxed at a higher effective rate then him. Billionaire Warren Buffett Calls It 'Outrageous' His Secretary Pays 2x's His Tax Rate – 'If This Is A War, My Side Has The Nuclear Bomb' - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/billionaire-warren-buffett-ca... - December 16th, 2024 - He explained, "I don't pay hardly any payroll taxes. Gov. Romney hardly pays any payroll taxes. Newt Gingrich hardly pays any payroll taxes." Driving the point home, he emphasized the disparity: "Debbie pays lots of payroll taxes." - Buffett's effective tax rate was 17.4% at the time, largely due to his income coming from capital gains, which are taxed much lower than ordinary wages. Bosanek, like many middle-class Americans, was paying nearly 36% when payroll and income taxes were combined. - According to a CBS News report, Buffett quickly clarified that he didn't blame Romney for following the law. "I don't blame Gov. Romney for paying the tax rate he paid," Buffett said. "I blame the U.S. Congress." - The disparity didn't bother Buffett – it drove him to advocate for sweeping changes to the tax code. In an op-ed for The New York Times, he argued for what would become known as the "Buffett Rule," a proposal to implement a minimum 30% tax on incomes exceeding $1 million. President Obama backed the idea, but opposition in Congress kept it from moving forward.

▲

toomuchtodo 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Republicans and conservatives simply don’t believe in taxes, and will take any action to make it as hard as possible to collect them out of ideology. As you mentioned, Mamdani proves government can work [1], and I look forward to more reps like him as election cycles occur and the US electorate turns over.

[1] https://www.mamdanibulletin.com/p/everything-zohran-mamdani-...

The pendulum will swing back, and be the opportunity to prevent this from ever happening again.

(i like taxes, with them i buy civilization, although i prefer they pay for social services and improving quality of life of humans with said resources, not endless wars in the middle east and tax cuts for the wealthiest driven by old men, their ideology, and their egos [n=1, ymmv, my two cents])

▲

freejazz 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

DoorDash is pretty much scum, stealing $130m in wages from their own "contractors"