Online grocery delivery company Weee! has agreed to pay $95,000 to settle allegations that it misclassified delivery drivers in the District of Columbia as independent contractors, denying them paid sick leave, overtime eligibility, split-shift pay, and workers' compensation coverage. The settlement, announced Tuesday, requires the company to pay $47,500 in penalties to the District and $47,500 in restitution to eligible current and former drivers.
D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb announced the agreement, alleging that Weee! misclassified at least 95 delivery drivers as independent contractors since 2022. According to WJLA, Schwalb's office found that Weee! exercised enough control over drivers' work for them to be considered employees under D.C. law, despite classifying them as contractors. Weee! describes itself as “America's largest online Asian supermarket.”
“We won't allow businesses in the District to cheat workers or gain an unfair advantage over their competitors by engaging in illegal misclassification,” Schwalb said, per the station's report. Eligible drivers will be contacted by a claims administrator within the next 90 days, per the attorney general's office.
A Structural Fix, Not Just a Check
Beyond the monetary terms, the settlement carries an operational mandate: under the agreement, Weee! must reclassify any delivery driver who spends more than 50% of their working time in the District as a W-2 employee, according to the Office of the Attorney General for the District of Columbia. That threshold effectively forces Weee! to convert its most consistent local drivers into full employees with associated benefits, rather than simply writing a check and continuing business as usual.
The alleged violations touch several specific D.C. labor protections. Under District regulations, employers must pay one additional hour at minimum wage whenever an employee works a split shift separated by a break longer than an hour on the same day — a requirement officials say Weee! evaded by treating drivers as contractors. The District's standard minimum wage rose to $18.40 per hour on July 1, one of the highest municipal wage floors in the country.
Not Weee!'s First Brush With Regulators
This is not the first time Weee! has faced enforcement over its driver classification practices. In August 2025, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell secured an $865,000 settlement with Weee! Logistics LLC, Weee! OD Foods LLC, and company president Min Liu over allegations that the company misclassified roughly 160 drivers as independent contractors and denied earned sick time, as Hoodline previously reported. The D.C. settlement names three legal entities — Weee! Inc., Weee! Logistics LLC, and Weee! OD Foods LLC — and covers alleged violations dating back to 2022.
Founded in 2015 by CEO Larry Liu and headquartered in Fremont, California, Weee! was valued at $4.1 billion following its Series E funding round in 2022 and surpassed $1 billion in annualized revenue in 2024, according to Sacra. That scale stands in sharp contrast to the $95,000 penalty, underscoring how gig platforms have often relied on contractor classifications to reduce operational costs until regulators intervene.
Part of a Broader D.C. Crackdown
The Weee! case is the latest in a string of misclassification actions brought by Schwalb's office against delivery and gig-economy companies. In August 2025, the office reached a $100,000 settlement with delivery platform DeliverThat over similar allegations that the company misclassified drivers and denied paid sick leave. In March 2025, Schwalb's office filed a lawsuit against instant-delivery company Gopuff, alleging the company had systematically misclassified its entire delivery driver workforce as independent contractors since 2015 — a case Hoodline covered in a lawsuit over driver misclassification.
The office's enforcement history extends further back. In March 2024, D.C. secured a $3 million settlement with customer service gig company Arise Virtual Solutions over worker misclassification, a deal that required $2 million in worker restitution and forced the company to cease operations in the District entirely. Schwalb's Workers' Rights and Antifraud Section recovered more than $19 million for workers between 2023 and early 2025, pushing lifetime wage theft and misclassification recoveries in D.C. past $35 million.
