A Manhattan Institute analyst argues that less than 10% of the settlement covers wages DoorDash actually failed to pay. Most of the rest comes from a disputed on-call pay formula, and millions go to penalties and groups aligned with the mayor.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani held a press conference last week, complete with a giant ceremonial check, to announce that DoorDash would pay $131.5 million to settle claims that it shortchanged New York City delivery workers. In a New York Post op-ed, Manhattan Institute policy analyst Santiago Vidal Calvo argues that the headline number tells a very different story from the fine print.
The actual underpayment
Vidal Calvo does not dispute that DoorDash got things wrong. The company admitted that $6.6 million never reached NYC Dashers and that another $5.7 million was paid late. He agrees workers deserve every dollar they earned and says the city was right to demand a fix.
But those two figures add up to about $12.3 million, less than a tenth of the settlement. By his account, the errors touched under 1% of DoorDash’s total payouts in the city. Most affected workers were short by $1 or less, and the average missing payment was $7.70. That, he writes, looks more like an accounting problem than the "corporate greed and impunity" the mayor described.
The on-call dispute
More than $83 million of the deal comes from a separate argument over "on-call time," meaning periods when a Dasher is logged into the app but not making a delivery. DoorDash was already paying for that time, using a formula it considered fair and legal. The city wanted a different calculation.
Vidal Calvo says the company chose to accept the city’s formula rather than face years of costly litigation against a government with deep pockets. No court ever ruled on the matter; the consent order closed an administrative investigation without a hearing. Even Department of Consumer and Worker Protection Commissioner Sam Levine conceded, "It’s complicated."
Where the money goes
Workers are set to receive about $115.4 million. The remainder is split among $11.3 million in civil penalties, $4.3 million for a new monitoring program and $468,000 to administer the deal, leaving roughly $16.1 million with the city.
Part of that pot is earmarked for the Workers Justice Project, a DSA-aligned labor group with close ties to Mamdani’s campaign, and for Princeton’s Workers’ Algorithm Observatory, which is to monitor new compliance rules. Vidal Calvo wants answers on how the monitoring money will be spent and judged, what the city will do with the penalties, and how much taxpayers spent on the three-year probe. City investigators combed through records covering 110 million working hours and 152 million transactions.
He also notes that the investigation began under Mayor Eric Adams and was well underway before Mamdani took office. In his view, Mamdani can claim credit for finishing the case but not for starting it, and taxpayers deserve "the full receipt" before the victory lap.
This piece summarizes an opinion column by Santiago Vidal Calvo published in the New York Post. The views described are the author’s, not this newsroom’s. The photograph is a stock file image.
