NEW YORK — The Delivery Protection Act has become the central business-policy fight of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s first year, and this week the pressure campaign reached City Hall from every direction at once. Business leaders publicly urged the mayor and the Council to reject the bill; a councilman who once backed it withdrew his support over potential job losses; and the legislation’s supporters — the Teamsters among them — have been demanding a floor vote since a rally outside City Hall on October 22.

The bill, Intro 518, sponsored by Council Member Tiffany Cabán, targets the subcontracting structure at the heart of e-commerce delivery. Amazon, FedEx and other large shippers currently deliver through third-party delivery service providers — DSPs — that set the drivers’ routes and quotas without the corporate parent bearing direct employment responsibility. The legislation would create a licensing system for distribution facilities and last-mile warehouses administered by the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, with safety, training and employment requirements attached. Its sharpest edge: a requirement that large companies directly employ the drivers who deliver their packages.

Supporters frame the bill around safety and accountability. Deliveries in the city reached roughly 2.5 million per day by 2024, according to a Comptroller’s report, and at least 18 large last-mile warehouses have opened since 2017 with, in the sponsors’ view, little oversight. Cabán argued at the October rally that companies like Amazon have operated in the city like the Wild West, ignoring workers’ rights; the Teamsters’ national leadership has echoed the point, saying subcontracting is used to deny drivers employment rights. The mayor has endorsed the bill as commonsense regulation of warehouses and the traffic they generate.

The opposition is broad and, this week, newly vocal. Business leaders urged Mamdani and the Council to reject the bill, warning it would cost thousands of jobs and raise delivery prices; an impact study sponsored by the Five Borough Jobs Campaign estimated it could eliminate up to 10,000 jobs. At the October rallies, small logistics owners — including Bronx operator Rudy Cazares and Logistics Xpress owner Bashar Yazghi — said the licensing regime would destroy family-run firms employing predominantly Black and Brown drivers. The National Urban League’s Marc Morial called the bill bad public policy driven by animus toward Amazon, noting that minority- and women-owned logistics businesses were not consulted. This week the New York Post reported that a councilman quietly withdrew his co-support, citing the job-loss projections — a sign the bill’s arithmetic may be slipping in a Council that approved the predecessor bill’s housing cousin only after deep cuts.

Money is now part of the story on both sides: Amazon has reportedly directed $5 million into the campaign against the bill, funding television and social-media advertising, while organized labor has mounted pickets and rallies to force a vote.

For the city’s business community, the outcome will signal how far Mamdani’s City Hall will go in restructuring a major industry’s labor arrangements — and whether Speaker Julie Menin schedules a vote at all. With the Council’s membership reshaped by this month’s election, the count is being recalculated in real time. Either way, the delivery economy — the industry that keeps 2.5 million packages a day moving — is about to learn whether it operates on the city’s terms or its own.