For more than a year, Esly Paredes shared regular dispatches of her life as a delivery driver for Amazon to her small following on TikTok — dishing on her preferred lunch spots and fashion scores among hundreds of videos of herself hauling packages and killing time between shifts.
In one April 30 post — filmed, like many of her videos, in full uniform inside a parked Amazon truck — a man she describes as her boss smiles and waves at the camera.
Paredes said her bosses never raised any issues about her fledgling social media presence. That is, until she posted a series of videos supporting a City Council bill fiercely opposed by Amazon and a consortium of groups representing the company’s subcontractors.
Paredes was fired on May 27 for violating her employer’s solicitation and social media policies, according to a copy of her termination letter obtained by The City Reporter, a charge she says violates her free speech rights. She filed a formal complaint to the National Labor Relations Board with the help of the Teamsters, which has been organizing Amazon delivery drivers in New York and California for the last several years.
“They thought I would stay quiet, and they thought that by firing me, they would silence me,” Paredes, a 31-year-old single mother from Jamaica, Queens, said in Spanish. “But I’m raising my voice, speaking out in my videos even more to explain to fellow drivers why these protections are necessary.”
Amazon spokesperson Leigh Anne Gullett said in a statement that the company had no involvement “in any personnel decision involving Ms. Paredes.”
“Delivery Service Partners are independent businesses that hire and manage their own employees,” said Gullett.
Vincent Satriano, owner of Paredes’ former employer Satriano Logistics/STAA, said in an email: “This decision followed repeated violations of my company’s policies. No other factors were involved.”
The bill Paredes backed would directly impact workers like her. Introduced by Councilmember Tiffany Cabán of Queens, it seeks to force Amazon to directly hire delivery workers that are currently employed by a patchwork of contractors. The bill is backed by 30 lawmakers and the Mamdani administration, but has yet to be voted on by the full City Council.
Amazon’s ‘Partners’
In New York, Amazon’s delivery fleet is subcontracted by more than 40 companies it refers to as “delivery service partners,” or DSPs — an arrangement critics say shields Amazon from liability in case of accidents, wage theft complaints, and collective bargaining. The online retail giant says those subcontractors are responsible for the workers, even though they drive Amazon-branded cars, wear Amazon-branded vests, and rely on Amazon for roadside support.
For years, federal regulators were building a landmark case over Amazon’s control over its contract drivers. Regional directors of the National Labor Relations Board in Los Angeles and Atlanta issued preliminary rulings in 2024 determining that Amazon is a joint employer of its subcontracted drivers and can be held liable for anti-union activity.
But those efforts dimmed in the second Trump administration with the appointment of a former outside attorney for Amazon as the head of the NLRB.
An exposé by Bloomberg Businessweek this month revealed the lengths that Amazon goes through to control the drivers it insists are not its employees: forcing its contractors to dispatch drivers in hazardous weather conditions against their own judgement, dictating which vendors they can go into business with and even setting drivers’ delivery routes.
In addition to requiring subcontracted drivers to wear the company’s uniform, Amazon also instructs them to be free of “unpleasant breath or body odor, modest perfume/cologne, and clean teeth, face/ears, fingernails and hair,” according to documents obtained by Bloomberg.
Amazon and business groups claim Cabán’s bill will kneecap small businesses and lead to thousands of lost jobs. Representatives for Amazon say if passed, the retail giant may need to consider pulling its operations out of New York entirely.
As Amazon and its subcontractors have escalated efforts to quash Cabán’s bill, multiple drivers employed by Amazon delivery service partners in The Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens who spoke with The City Reporter said their bosses offered to pay employees to attend an April rally at City Hall against the bill and to sit in on meetings with lawmakers as representatives for the company lobbied against reforms.
One worker who spoke with The City Reporter, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation, said he received a full day’s pay and free car service to City Hall and back for their time. Workers at other DSPs say their colleagues received identical offers from their own bosses.
Cabán said that she met with Paredes before her firing and saw one of her videos where she is hauling heavy packages by herself on the job without any backup. She said her office has been in contact since her firing as well and is in “full support” of her charges against Amazon.
Fired Driver’s Free Speech Claim
Paredes, a driver for about three years before she was fired, first started posting videos in favor of the Delivery Protection Act after the April rally at City Hall. She did not attend that rally herself, but heard about the bill through other coworkers who did attend — on both sides of the issue — and eventually supported the bill. She said she wanted her audience of fellow delivery drivers to have all the facts about the City Council and the Teamsters’ efforts.
Her supervisor told her to stop, which she said she interpreted as a directive to stop filming TikToks on the job. But she continued to post about the bill, as well as her regular content, at home, often in her Amazon uniform.
“I have a right to free speech in this country,” Paredes told The City Reporter. “They can’t tell me what to do in my own home.”
She then received two final written warnings from the human resources department at Satriano Logistics, dated May 19, instructing her to delete all her videos within 24 hours over her violations of the company’s social media and solicitation policies.
“It has come to our attention that you have posted content that disparages the company and discloses sensitive operational information,” read the notice, which also instructed her to stop all recordings.
In a formal complaint submitted to the federal National Labor Relations Board contesting Paredes’ firing, the Teamsters wrote that her social media was “protected concerted activit[y]” and that the company’s demands that she delete all of her content interfered with those rights. The Teamsters submitted the complaint against Amazon and Satriano Logistics/STAA on June 4.
Paredes insists that until she started speaking favorably about the Delivery Protection Act, none of her supervisors had raised any issues about her social media content. In fact, she claims she’d had casual conversations with at least one superior about potentially collaborating on a video to promote the shipping company.
She posted another video after her firing, calling out Amazon directly and denouncing her “unjust” firing. Referring to Amazon, she says in Spanish: “They’re terrified about this bill, because they’re afraid that if we are in full knowledge of our rights, we are going to defend ourselves and push for this bill that benefits us — but not Amazon and the DSPs.”
She told The City Reporter she’s struggling to find a new job and has dipped into her savings to support herself and her young daughter. She applied for food stamps, but she is still waiting for the benefit to kick in.
“I have nothing against my bosses — this is all on Amazon,” she said. “They need to take responsibility for us, respect our rights and be fair with us.”
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