The City Council on Wednesday voted to approve four bills aimed at strengthening on-the-job protections for street vendors and app-based grocery delivery workers — overriding vetoes by Mayor Eric Adams of three of those bills while passing a new one.
A supermajority of Council members first approved three of the bills in votes in July and August before they were later struck down by the mayor, triggering a bitter showdown between City Hall and Council Speaker Adrienne Adams.
Those three bills are: Intro 47, which eliminates all criminal penalties for licensed street vendors and misdemeanor penalties for unlicensed sellers; and Intros 1133 and 1135, which require app-based grocery delivery companies such as Instacart to abide by the same minimum wage requirements as restaurant takeout delivery platforms. All three will go into effect next March.
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The bill passed for the first time Wednesday, Intro 20, requires food delivery apps to provide workers with safety equipment and ensure they complete street safety training. As THE CITY reported, that measure had stalled for more than 18 months as leading delivery platforms spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote the political campaigns of Council leaders, including Speaker Adams.
In a rally with vendors, delivery workers, advocates and fellow elected officials Wednesday morning hours before the vote, Speaker Adams said the mayor’s vetoes “demonstrate that he prioritizes taking action to fuel greater corporate profits at the expense of workers in our city who continue to be exploited.”
She continued: “I don’t know about you, but I don’t know why we’re here today, about to enact an override on legislation that was worked on collaboratively with this mayoral administration. The mayor discarded the work of his own staff, and inexplicably vetoed them.”
The mayor vetoed the Instacart bills last month, saying in a statement at the time that it was “not the right time” to pass the new wage requirements, warning the legislation risked raising grocery prices at a time of growing inflation — echoes of arguments also made by industry groups who opposed the bill, including one backed by Instacart.
He also vetoed the vendor decriminalization bill at the eleventh-hour in July, arguing that easing up on vendors would be “unfair to law-abiding business owners and poses real public health and safety risks.”
This is not the first confrontation between the Council and the Adams administration. Mayor Adams, a moderate democrat, has sought to overturn bills approved by the left-leaning City Council on a range of issues several times during his term, most notably with his Jan. 2024 veto of a bill banning solitary confinement in the city’s jails; two weeks later, the Council voted overwhelmingly to override that veto, too.
More Protections
Ahead of the Council vote on Wednesday afternoon, City Hall spokesperson Zachary Nosanchuk doubled down on the mayor’s veto for the delivery worker bills.
“While Mayor Adams does not take the power of a veto lightly, we stand by our decision to support our most vulnerable residents who rely on grocery delivery, including seniors, people with disabilities, and those who receive SNAP and EBT benefits,” said Nosanchuk.
Intros 1133 and 1135, introduced by Council members Jennifer Gutiérrez and Sandy Nurse, seek to apply the same wages and protections afforded to food delivery workers to workers delivering groceries.
Nurse’s bill gives grocery delivery workers the same hourly pay guarantee as workers toiling for platforms such as DoorDash or Grubhub, currently $21.44 hourly before tips. Gutiérrez’s bill amends existing pay transparency rules and bathroom access requirements to include “all contracted delivery workers retained to deliver goods for a delivery service.”
“It’s very very clear what side we’re on and what side the mayor is on,” Nurse said at the rally Wednesday morning. “We are here with the people, we are here with the workers who deliver every day for this city, and he’s with the billionaires and the millionaires standing in the way of you all who are just trying to make a living.”
David Limas, a 41-year-old Instacart delivery worker from Mexico, said the new laws meant “stability, dignity and safety” for the tens of thousands of workers like himself.
“There are days when after spending the whole day delivering food to others, that I don’t even have enough to feed myself,” Limas said in Spanish at the rally Wednesday morning, his right hand still clutching his bike helmet. “Every day we risk our lives in traffic, in the cold, in the heat, carrying heavy bags and climbing stairs. And after all that, the apps can still punish us with deactivations, taking away our work from their apps from one day to the next.”
Meanwhile, with its 39-7 vote to approve Intro 20, sponsored by Councilmember Gale Brewer (D-Manhattan), the Council advanced a measure Uber and DoorDash had long lobbied to obstruct. It requires platforms to provide safety equipment and training to employees while requiring delivery workers to be clearly identifiable as working for the platforms — the same rules that have applied for years to local businesses that hire their own delivery workers.
Brewer said she was “more than happy” with the final version of the bill, which Brewer refused to back down from during negotiations even as the companies claimed the bill was unfair and extreme. Companies found to have repeatedly violated the requirements could have their operating licenses suspended.
Brewer secured the vote after adjusting the bill to ensure that worker data cannot be used for law enforcement purposes, at the urging on immigration and worker safety advocates.
Vendor Bill Support Wanes
On the vendor decriminalization front, the 35 votes the bill received to narrowly override the mayor’s veto with four members absent Wednesday afternoon is less than the 40 it had already originally tallied on June 30 — with some members who had initially supported the bill reversing their initial votes to either deny or abstain in the veto override.
At least two Council members — Joann Ariola (R-Queens) and Susan Zhuang (D-Brooklyn) — also flipped to support the override.
“This administration has used [the veto power] more to score political points in an election year than to help the people who live and work in this city,” Ariola said, explaining her vote. “Time and time he has the opportunity to fight for the hard-working people of this city who are trying to eke out a living every single day, but he has chosen to side with the big-money interests and donors … I believe that the power of the veto is important, but I also believe that it must be used responsibly and should be called out harshly when it isn’t.”
In a conversation with THE CITY Tuesday prior to the vote, Councilmember Shekar Krishnan (D-Queens), who introduced the bill, said some of his colleagues in the Council have moved to back the bill as a way to reject the “mayor’s continued destruction of the laws that we pass.”
The legislation, Krishnan added, was borne out of a set of unanimous recommendations from a Street Vendor Advisory Board that includes real estate and business representatives as well as the NYPD — which Adams had said in 2022 that he “will begin to implement.”
The passage of the law comes as the number of criminal tickets against vendors has skyrocketed, and continues to climb under the Adams administration. The NYPD issued 918 criminal tickets for vending through July 15 this year, up 16% from the 792 over the same time last year, according to an analysis of the latest NYPD summons data available through mid-July by THE CITY.
Those criminal charges can negatively impact immigration proceedings. Of the roughly 23,000 street vendors across the five boroughs, 96% are born outside of the U.S, estimates a 2024 survey.
First Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro, in a statement ahead of the veto override, criticized the Council for the move, contending that it is an “an economic justice issue that violates the rights of every small business and licensed vendor whose very existence is jeopardized and undermined by illegal vending.”
“What the Council is doing here is an affront to all those legal businesses, most of them owned and operated by immigrants,” Mastro said. “That’s why Mayor Adams vetoed this bill, which strips law enforcement officers of the authority to address illegal street vending, even in the most egregious and unhealthy cases.”
The new law does allow officers to continue to dole out criminal tickets for unlicensed vending — a category that has accounted for 85% of the criminal vending summonses issued through July 15 this year. Officers can also continue to hand out civil tickets, which can cost up to up $1,000.
Ah Long Yan, a Chinese vendor from Flushing, noted at the rally that he’s observed how enforcement in the area has intensified since mayor Adams started campaigning for reelection in the neighborhood about two months ago.
“He noticed how it’s affected his campaign, and since then they’ve been clamping down on us,” Yan said in Mandarin outside City Hall, hinting at how the mayor has been catering to business interests. “It’s like this park where we’re standing by: The businesses are like the large trees, and us vendors are just like the grass underneath. You tell me, would the park look good if you only let the trees grow without the grass?”
A father of three teenagers, Yan told THE CITY after the rally Wednesday that he’s lost count of the number of civil tickets he’s received, and has received a criminal ticket upwards of $500 for vending accessories and knick knacks without a license on Main Street.
Reforms that increase the issuance of food-selling licenses in 2021 do not apply to merchandise vendors. Yan said he hasn’t had any success with obtaining a merchandise permit, which has been capped at 853 since 1979 with more than 11,000 people currently on a waitlist to acquire one, according to the city’s latest tally in 2023. And with an income of about $100 on a good day, Yan said, he can’t afford to rent a permit off the market for nearly $200 a day.
Speaking on the fact that unlicensed vendors can still receive criminal tickets after today’s veto override, Yan said: “It’s not fair. Do you think it’s fair? We’re not out here committing crimes.”
Krishnan emphasized that the law passed on Wednesday is just one part of a larger vending reform package — while a bill by Councilmember Pierina Sanchez (D-The Bronx) to eventually lift the cap on vendor permitting is still pending before the Council.
As the rally dispersed, a vendor who’s been selling hats, sweaters and keychains outside a CVS just down the block from City Hall all morning was now surrounded by five police officers.
“They’re trying to issue a ticket to me,” said the vendor, who did not give his name but said he’s been selling in the area since before the 2001 World Trade Center attacks. He started packing up his merchandise as the officers watched: “I’m a little nervous now.”
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