Talking Headways Podcast: The Logistics of Package Delivery
This week on Talking Headways, Arizona State University Professor Benjamin Fong discusses a piece he wrote in Urban Omnibus titled, “Where’s My Package?”
We discuss his work trying to suss out how e-commerce companies like Amazon have built their logistics systems and the difficulties of last-mile deliveries.
Fong shares potentially beneficial legislation, movements that could benefit workers and the process of siting warehouses that impact small towns to the benefit of big corporations.
Scroll past the audio player below for a partial edited transcript of the episode — or click here for a full, AI-generated (and typo-ridden) readout.
Jeff Wood: What about regulations? I know here in California we passed AB 98, which impacts, you know, truck routing and air quality and green energy and vehicle use and stuff like that around new warehouses and stuff. I’m wondering how that impacts the decision making of these larger companies that are thinking about these things.
Benjamin Fong: Yeah, I don’t know a ton about AB 98. I would guess that it’s not gonna be doing much. From what I’ve heard about the legislative history of that, it was very much a piece of compromise legislation, even something that was introduced so that something stricter wasn’t introduced. Yeah, there’s just a lot of outs in the bill as I understand it.
Again, I’m not an AB 98 expert, but it seems like it’s going to probably impact California very little in terms of like the Inland Empire build out. I think probably more, more impactful would be local site fights at the municipal level. So if you can get, uh, city council to be fighting an Amazon.
I mean, just in the last year the site fights have really been around data centers more than warehouses and there have been some tremendously successful site fights. So in those terms, I would say the state level regulation that I know of. It is probably not going to impact warehousing development that much.
The sort of regulatory measure that I’m most excited about, that I think actually will be pretty effective and could be replicated in a number of cities, is the Delivery Protection Act in New York City. This is something that has been talked about for a while, but was recently introduced by a City Council member, Tiffany Caban, and the idea is that it’s a safety issue and I think it is for Amazon to outsource its delivery workforce.
So for your listeners who don’t know, anytime someone’s dropping off a package at your doorstep or in your lobby, from Amazon, even if they are driving an Amazon-branded van and wearing an Amazon vest, they’re not employed by Amazon directly. These are all third parties. Sometimes they’re flex drivers, so they’re kind of like gig workers, Uber drivers for packages or they’re employees of what are called delivery service providers.
These are third parties, but captive third party delivery service providers for Amazon. What the Delivery Protection Act does is to say that’s an unsafe situation, because the liability for any particular delivery driver is not going back to Amazon should they have an accident in the city. It’s going to some DSP that Amazon will be quick to cut its contract with, right?
And so as a matter of urban safety, the Delivery Protection Act argues that these should be W-2 employees of Amazon, right? If you’re delivering packages for Amazon, you should be a W-2 employee and that will shore up liability in the case of accidents or something like that. I think that this, this kind of thing would be tremendously impactful for a company like Amazon. It would certainly get them to take responsibility for their drivers.
There was a National Labor Relations Board case a few years back now that dictated that Amazon should be considered a joint employer of its delivery workforce. And they had something, like, I don’t know, seven criteria by which you should judge whether or not someone can be a joint employer and Amazon fulfilled all seven, like Amazon so dictates their work terms that I think it’s ridiculous to say that they’re not their actual employer.
So this kind of regulatory thing, especially in cities like New York, but then, I don’t know, LA, San Francisco, Chicago, I think it could be tremendously impactful.
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