New York City is suing a delivery app for stealing workers’ pay—signaling that under Mamdani, gig companies can no longer break the law with impunity.

Hopefully, this is a movement that can grow.

Inside the office of the nonprofit Worker’s Justice Project in Brooklyn, Gustavo Ajche pulled up a screenshot on his phone. It showed the delivery app Motoclick had paid him $6.75 for three hours of work in November 2024—a fraction of the city’s $19.56 minimum hourly rate for delivery workers at the time.

“They keep you waiting for hours, and sometimes you don’t make any money for the work you put in,” said Ajche, an immigrant from Guatemala and member of Los Deliveristas Unidos, a delivery workers group.

Ajche, 41, is one of 20 workers who filed complaints with the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP), the agency that enforces labor standards for delivery workers.

On January 15, the city administration filed a lawsuit against Motoclick and its CEO, Juan Pablo Salinas Salek, based on those complaints, seeking to shut down the company’s operations entirely.