Roughly 200 e-bike delivery workers in Manhattan learned Wednesday night that their jobs were ending after Amazon terminated its contract with their employer, Kaizen Management Solutions. The positions are set to be eliminated on November 18, with affected workers receiving benefits through January 31.
Kaizen operated as a Manhattan delivery service partner contracted by Amazon for same-day electric cargo bike deliveries, according to Streetsblog New York City, which first reported the layoffs. A letter sent to employees said approximately 200 workers would be impacted, and Ezra Tilaye, who owns Kaizen, told the outlet that Amazon had terminated the company's contract just before the firings went out.
Amazon confirmed it ended the contract, saying its own investigation turned up multiple breaches involving fraud, including a failure to accurately record drivers' hours worked. The company also said Kaizen had put several e-cargo bikes back on the road before necessary repairs were completed. Amazon said the safety of its employees, partners, and the communities it operates in is its top priority, and that it ended the partnership specifically because of those safety issues and contract breaches.
Amazon Says It's Helping Workers Find New Jobs
Amazon said it is supporting Kaizen's affected employees by connecting them with other delivery service providers in the area, though the company has not detailed how many workers might actually land new positions through that effort. The abrupt timeline has already raised questions about whether the layoffs comply with New York's WARN Act, which the Streetsblog report describes as requiring employers with more than 50 employees to provide severance or at least 90 days' written notice for layoffs affecting more than 25 people. Separately, the federal Department of Labor says employers with 100 or more employees generally must give at least 60 days' written notice before a mass layoff affecting 50 or more workers at a single site, though the U.S. Department of Labor notes exceptions to how that threshold is counted.
This is not an isolated episode. A Teamsters report found that Amazon has closed 35 delivery service partners in New York since 2018, resulting in the loss of more than 3,500 jobs, and that Amazon drivers have accounted for 25 percent of all workers laid off in the state's transportation and warehousing industry since 2023. A complaint filed alongside that report, produced with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the National Employment Law Project, alleges at least 13 delivery service partners failed to give employees legally required notice between 2023 and 2025, affecting 1,394 New York workers.
A Pattern Beyond New York
Similar scenes have played out elsewhere. A Teamsters complaint exhibit lists King Delivery LLC as laying off 200 workers beginning in October 2025 after giving just seven days' notice. In Washington state, delivery company 2EZY laid off 120 employees and shut down entirely after Amazon ended its contract, according to Inc. That closure produced dueling accounts of notice: 2EZY said it learned of Amazon's decision only one business day before the layoffs, while Amazon told MyNorthwest it had notified the company on September 1 that it would not renew the delivery service partner agreement, giving 30 days' notice.
Paul Sonn said the pattern of mass layoffs and WARN Act violations at what he called captive delivery service partners shows they are not bona fide independent businesses, and he urged the City Council to approve the Delivery Protection Act swiftly. That bill, which the City Council is currently debating, would require Amazon to directly hire its delivery workforce rather than relying on a network of smaller contracted companies, as it does now. Mayor Mamdani supports the measure, but City Council Speaker Julie Menin has not brought it to a vote, saying at a press conference last month that she was still working through the bill's legal issues with the city's law department.
Safety Record Looms Over the Debate
Amazon has threatened to pull its e-bikes out of New York City if the Delivery Protection Act passes, even as the company says it is transitioning from trucks to electric cargo quads it describes as safer. The backdrop includes an interactive tool from the Alliance for a Greater New York showing Amazon-associated delivery vans drew 14,290 tickets from cameras and traffic enforcement agents between July 2021 and June 2025. A separate review by the advocacy group ALIGN, examining citation records tied to 637 Amazon-related license plates over roughly the same period, counted 14,210 street-safety violations citywide, according to amNewYork. The dossier underlying those figures does not reconcile whether the two counts measure identical categories of violations.
Delivery volume in the city has climbed sharply in recent years, with daily package deliveries rising from 1.8 million in 2019 to 2.5 million in 2024, per data attributed to the NYC Comptroller's office. The New York Times reported in May that Amazon had expanded to more than 300 cargo bikes making same-day deliveries in Manhattan, though the newspaper noted the four-wheeled, enclosed bikes can carry more than 100 parcels but take two trips to match roughly the same number of deliveries as a single van.
