Amid pushback from Uber and DoorDash, members introduce a bill that would require advance notice to workers before their accounts are deactivated.
This article originally appeared in The City.
By Claudia Irizzary Apoint
Manhattan Voice
September 15, 2025
NEW YORK - José Valdez worked doing deliveries for Grubhub for more than four years, zipping on his e-bike across lower Manhattan — accruing, he said, stellar customer ratings. He’d never received a complaint in his time working for the app, his main source of income.
But last week, he said, his account was locked out of his account without warning. It wasn’t until he appealed his deactivation that Valdez, 54, learned he was removed because of one single delayed delivery. He’s still fighting to get his job back.
“I consider this deactivation to be completely unjust,” said Valdez. “They should not be able to do this without offering a reasonable explanation.”
The City Council’s consumer and worker protection committee on Friday weighed a bill that would prohibit delivery apps from deactivating workers unless for just cause or “bona-fide economic reasons” — highly sought-after protections from deliveristas who have long charged that the companies deactivate their accounts for arbitrary and unjust reasons, often with little or no explanation.
The purpose of Intro 1332, according to its lead sponsor, Councilmember Justin Brannan (D-Brooklyn) is to protect workers from what are effectively abrupt firings without warning. It would require 14 days’ notice before the account is deactivated.
“I don’t think we’re trying to say that these apps shouldn’t be allowed to fire people,” he told THE CITY before the hearing. “But there needs to be a clear — if I broke the rules, you need to tell me what the rules were before I broke them.”
Workers, he added, “should have the opportunity to explain themselves.”
A similar bill that would apply to Uber and Lyft drivers, from Councilmember Shekar Krishnan (D-Queens), is pending in the Council’s transportation committee.
Some lawmakers in the Council have moved aggressively to regulate delivery apps’ business practices, with mixed support from Council Speaker Adrienne Adams. One bill that passed this week, requiring safety equipment and training, was bottled up for more than a year and a half amid aggressive lobbying from the platforms claiming it could put them out of business.
Uber and DoorDash spent significant sums to boost key Council leaders in this year’s primary election, including Speaker Adams’ losing campaign for mayor. Also benefiting from the tech companies’ spending were Julie Menin, who chairs the Council committee that is considering the bills, and Carmen de la Rosa, who chairs the labor committee. Both are vying to succeed Adams as speaker.
Brannan, who unsuccessfully ran for comptroller, is term-limited at the end of this year; the bill’s prime co-sponsor, Sandy Nurse (D-Brooklyn), won the June Democratic primary for her second full term in the Council.
A representative from Grubhub did not respond to a request for comment.
Freddi Goldstein, representing Uber and its UberEats service, told lawmakers that the deactivations are a direct consequence of the minimum pay standards the City Council previously imposed — claiming in her testimony before the Council that the law “expressly” encourages the apps to deactivate workers as a means of reducing fraud. The company, she said, only deactivates accounts it deems engaging in fraudulent conduct — such as using false IDs or sharing accounts — or unsafe behavior.
With the exception of extreme situations like sexual assault, Uber provides workers with a warning before deactivating accounts, Goldstein said. She added that while the company is “not opposed to reasonable industry standards for deactivations,” that Brannan’s bill “needs substantial work in order to balance fairness and transparency with serious safety and operational concerns.”
Worker complaints of deactivations predate the minimum pay rate law, which went into effect in December 2023.
That August, while the fate of the law was still tied up in state court, more than a dozen workers filed wage theft complaints against DoorDash, charging the company withheld their last paychecks after their accounts were deactivated without warning. Attempts to regain access to their accounts and get their payments, those workers told THE CITY at the time, were frustrating and demoralizing.
Workers do not receive any immediate explanation for why their accounts are deactivated, Ligia Guallpa, the executive director of Workers Justice Project, which represents delivery workers, told committee chair Julie Menin during the hearing.
The workers’ typical experience, Guallpa told the committee, is as follows: They attempt to log into their account, only to find it is deactivated. Days later, they receive a boilerplate email from the company informing them their account was deactivated due to “fraud,” Guallpa said — but without any details of the alleged fraud or when the incident occurred. Though workers have the option to appeal, the process can drag on for months without resolution.
The app is the “prosecutor, judge and jury in these situations,” responded Krishnan.
“This is something that has been going on for years,” Sergio Ajche, a delivery worker and leader of Los Deliveristas Unidos, told THE CITY. “It has happened to every single worker at one point or another.”
Valdez, the Grubhub worker, actually started delivering for that company after getting deactivated from UberEats. He was kicked out of the platform, he told THE CITY, after he received a negative review from a customer who complained that the ice cream he’d delivered was melted. He has not had access to his UberEats account since.
Goldstein, the Uber representative, said she could not comment on specific cases, adding that the company encourages any worker to contact them to resolve disputes with their accounts.
In a statement, DoorDash representative Kassandra Perez-Desir opposed the bill, claiming the bill would make it more difficult for the company to dismiss workers who flout safety rules.
“Int. 1332, as written, would make it harder to remove unsafe or dangerous actors from the platform — the exact opposite of what the Council said it wanted just days ago when it passed new e-bike safety rules putting strict accountability on companies,” said Perez-Desir. “This bill also risks undermining safety by discouraging consumers from speaking up in the rare event of a dangerous interaction.”
More than two dozen workers who lost access to their accounts testified in support of Brannan’s bill on Friday. Among them are members of Workers Justice Project, the parent organization of Los Deliveristas Unidos, and Desis Rising Up and Moving, a community group that organizes Bangladeshi delivery workers.
Representatives from the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection and the office of Comptroller Brad Lander also testified in favor of the bill. Representatives for DCWP suggested amending the bill to include severance pay for fired workers.
Carlos Ortiz and Elizabeth Wagoner, both deputy commissioners at the DCWP, testified that their office received complaints about deactivations from workers at more than a half dozen different companies both before and after the minimum pay law went into effect.
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