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Comment by jtbayly | Hacker News Reader

But… what does it do?!

I’m all about holding Amazon to the same standards, but what precisely does this accomplish? The subcontracting delivery companies already have to follow the same laws as every other company, don’t they?

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The act basically makes Amazon responsible for these subcontractors. BTW, they are not only ones who do this, UPS and Fedex have similar setups.

The problem here is Amazon farms out delivery to these companies, set impossible delivery standards that require these subcontractor employees to do things that break the law OR cause damage to their health. However, since Amazon is technically not employing them, they have no liability.

>set impossible delivery standards that require these subcontractor employees to do things that break the law OR cause damage to their health

Source? Is it actually physically "impossible", or simply a race to the bottom dynamic?

Search youtube for drivers talking about thus from their personal experiences. There are hundreds of horror stories there to get you started. There have been websites dedicated to collecting such stories, though several have been lawyered to death.

Race to bottom dynamic

isn't this the fault of the subcontractor for agreeing to the impossible?

That's what i'm confused about, no one is holding a gun to the subcontractor's heads forcing them to do the impossible

It requires Amazon to directly employ delivery drivers in New York City and sets up a licensing scheme for last-mile delivery.

Isn't that.. worse? Putting local businesses out of jobs and instead consolidating all of them directly under the company's umbrella?

Are these really local businesses or are they employees forced to take on liability as a condition of employment? Tech has been mislabeling employees as independent contractors for years.

It would probably make the most sense for Amazon to scale out their on-road infra as drone delivery capacity (and much more slowly, the regulatory environment) is hammered out but I’m personally leaning towards the org going for a more practical response that ends up routing most packages through USPS instead.

Agree. Unclear on what the actual specific harms are, whether they systemic, and how a new set of laws would help fix it.

Also what are the harms that new rules introduce? Are you going to eliminate a bunch of new small businesses that do deliveries and replace them with everything being under one, giant, multi-trillion dollar company?

The bill[1], which is named in the video, is available on the public Internet.

1 - https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=7...

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