Amazon's chief lobbyist fighting a New York City bill that would force the company to directly employ its delivery drivers is Jessica Schumer, the daughter of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

New York state lobbying disclosures identify Jessica Schumer as one of four Amazon lobbyists working the New York City Council, and three sources with knowledge of the effort told The American Prospect she has taken the lead role opposing the Delivery Protection Act. The bill, sponsored by Councilmember Tiffany Cabán, would bar companies operating warehouses from contracting out deliveries to third parties, a direct challenge to Amazon's delivery service provider model, which uses subcontractors for last-mile package runs.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani endorsed the bill this week with a video posted from the official NYC mayor account on X, raising the political stakes around a measure that already has 35 co-sponsors among the council's 51 members. On the other side stands one of the most connected names in Democratic politics, armed with what sources describe as the largest lobbying budget Amazon has ever deployed in New York City.

Jessica Schumer has been "in meetings with council members" to oppose the bill

Jessica Schumer became Amazon's head of New York policy and community engagement in January. The title, as the Prospect's reporting notes, functions as a euphemism for in-house lobbyist. She joined Amazon in 2020 as a senior policy director and previously served as policy director for Tim Kaine during his 2016 vice-presidential run alongside Hillary Clinton.

One source familiar with the lobbying effort said Schumer "has been in meetings with council members, been doing outreach with council members in opposition to the bill." Another source said Amazon would spend more on lobbying against this single piece of legislation than any other corporation seeking to influence the council this session.

A third source put it more bluntly:

"What I've heard is that this is by far the most Amazon has ever spent, more than HQ2 lobbying spent, with Jessica Schumer at the helm."

Neither Jessica Schumer nor Amazon immediately responded to requests for comment. Chuck Schumer's office also failed to respond.

The family connection is not new. In 2022, the New York Post reported that both Schumer daughters were employed by Big Tech giants, Jessica at Amazon and her sister Alison at Facebook, while their father held the power as Senate Majority Leader to advance or stall antitrust legislation targeting those same companies. One progressive operative told the Post at the time: "If you were a judge with a kid who worked for Facebook you'd recuse yourself from the case."

That antitrust legislation, which would have prevented tech platforms from favoring their own products over competitors, never came up for a vote. Over 80 former Schumer staffers were working directly or indirectly for Big Tech companies at the time, and Schumer was raising significant sums from Silicon Valley donors for the 2022 midterm elections. Many progressives held him responsible for the bills' quiet death.

Amazon's subcontracting model faces legal and political pressure on multiple fronts

The Delivery Protection Act would require all delivery facilities and service providers to obtain licenses from the NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. It would establish safety, training, and labor standards for delivery drivers in the city. Most critically for Amazon, it would end the subcontracting arrangement that allows the company to avoid directly employing the workers who carry its packages to customers' doors.

Amazon has deployed this delivery service provider model across the country for nearly a decade. The company contracts with small businesses, DSPs, that hire and manage drivers. Amazon sets the routes, the quotas, and the pace. But because the drivers technically work for the DSPs, Amazon has argued it bears no direct responsibility for their wages or working conditions.

That argument recently received a boost from the National Labor Relations Board, which determined this year that Amazon was not a joint employer with its DSPs and could not be held accountable for safety violations or union avoidance at those contractors.

But the New Jersey Attorney General's office reached a different conclusion. It recently filed an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon alleging the company subjects DSP workers to dangerous and brutal conditions while suppressing their pay. The complaint accuses Amazon of abusing monopsony power, essentially, using its dominance as the primary buyer of delivery labor to dictate terms that workers cannot refuse. Chuck Schumer has not publicly weighed in on the New Jersey case or the New York City bill.

DSP driver pay runs almost half of what UPS drivers earn

The economics behind the bill tell a clear story. Average pay for Amazon's DSP drivers runs almost half that of drivers at UPS, which employs its delivery workers directly. Eleven new Amazon last-mile facilities have opened in New York City since 2020, and traffic injuries rose by roughly 50 percent near two of those facilities in Queens.

Amazon's response to the bill has been aggressive. In city council testimony, the company warned it would "seriously examine how we could still meet our commitment to New Yorkers, which includes the potential for relocating operations and delivery facilities outside of New York City." The company argued that dismantling its subcontracting setup would destroy more than 40 small businesses operating as DSPs in New York, employing roughly 5,000 people.

The bill does include an employee retention clause that would, in theory, require Amazon to offer to rehire DSP workers. But the threat to pull operations out of the city entirely mirrors a familiar corporate playbook: warn of job losses to discourage regulation, regardless of whether those losses would actually materialize.

At the April council hearing where the bill was first considered, Amazon brought in dozens of DSP workers to testify against the measure. Streetsblog NYC reported that Amazon provided those workers with $70 in Uber vouchers to attend. When a company pays its subcontracted workers to show up and oppose a bill that would give those same workers better pay and protections, the arrangement speaks for itself.

The bill's political trajectory has also shifted in ways worth watching. The 2025 version attracted up to 41 co-sponsors, and Council Speaker Julie Menin was among the original backers. The 2026 version has only 35 co-sponsors, and Menin's name is gone. Whether her withdrawal reflects active opposition or a quieter calculation is unclear, but the drop in support coincides with what sources describe as Amazon's most expensive lobbying campaign in New York history. Internal Democratic leadership conflicts have become a recurring feature of the party's relationship with corporate interests.

Schumer's "North Star" and the family business of influence

After Mamdani won the New York City mayoral race, Chuck Schumer offered a carefully worded statement to the New York Times:

"Through many different mayors and many different philosophies, I have had a North Star: help New York, which I love. That is not going to change."

Helping New York, in this case, apparently means standing aside while his daughter leads a corporate lobbying operation against a bill backed by the city's new mayor, a bill designed to improve conditions for thousands of delivery workers earning half of what their unionized counterparts make.

The Schumer family's entanglement with Big Tech is not a side issue. It is the pattern. In 2022, the senator's family ties to Amazon and Facebook coincided with the quiet burial of tech antitrust legislation that had bipartisan support. Now his daughter sits at the center of Amazon's effort to defeat worker protections in the nation's largest city. Neither the senator nor his daughter has offered any public explanation for how these roles coexist with the elder Schumer's stated commitment to helping New York.

Mamdani's endorsement of the Delivery Protection Act sets up a direct confrontation. The bill has majority support on the council, but majority support has not been enough before, the 2025 version had more co-sponsors and still did not advance. Amazon's lobbying muscle, led by a lobbyist whose last name carries weight in every Democratic office in the state, creates a gravitational pull that raw co-sponsor counts do not capture. When Democratic leaders talk about standing up for working people, the test is not what they say from the podium, it is what happens in the lobbying meetings their family members attend.

The Delivery Protection Act asks a straightforward question: should the company that sets the routes, the quotas, and the pace also bear responsibility for the workers who do the driving? Amazon's answer, delivered through Chuck Schumer's daughter, is no.

Voters in New York, and taxpayers watching from the rest of the country, can decide what that arrangement says about who the Democratic establishment actually works for.