New York City is taking aim at one of the biggest complaints from gig workers: Account deactivations.
On Friday, the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, or DCWP, said that Uber Eats would reinstate the accounts of as many as 10,000 people that were deactivated between December 2023 and September 2024.
The reactivations are part of a settlement under which Uber Eats, Fantuan, and HungryPanda will pay a cumulative $5.2 million over violations of New York City’s minimum pay law for delivery workers. Some of that money will be paid out to roughly 49,000 delivery workers in New York City as damages, according to the DCWP.
Both the reinstatements and the payouts are meant to compensate workers after the apps either didn’t pay workers or deactivated their accounts after customers cancelled their orders, according to the DCWP. Uber did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Affected workers should have their accounts automatically reactivated, a spokesperson for the DCWP told Business Insider. Delivery workers who don’t get back on to the app but believe that their accounts were deactivated due to their cancellation rates should file a complaint with the Department, the spokesperson added.
New York City’s settlement is the latest government effort to regulate deactivations among gig workers. Last year, Seattle implemented a law regulating how gig work apps deactivate workers’ accounts. The law requires the app to provide 14 days of notice before a deactivation and says that a human must review the choice, for instance.
The settlement is also New York City’s latest action related to gig workers since Mayor Zohran Mamdani took office one month ago. Since then, the city has warned delivery apps over their pay practices and started enforcing a law aimed at increasing delivery workers’ earnings from tips.
For delivery workers on apps like Uber Eats and DoorDash, deactivations can pose a major threat to their earnings.
The delivery services often deactivate accounts with little warning or explanation, Business Insider has reported previously. As independent contractors, delivery workers don’t have the same protections as full-time employees. All the while, gig workers can miss out on work and earnings.
While some workers try to fight the deactivations, many apps require them to go through binding arbitration, which means that workers can’t appeal the decision about their account.
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