In August 2024, the National Labor Relations Board's Region 31 found that Amazon is a joint employer of delivery drivers at Battle Tested Strategies — a DSP that had been running routes out of Amazon's Palmdale, California facility before Amazon terminated the contract in 2023. That finding is now in active federal proceedings that Amazon has failed twice to stop. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals denied Amazon's attempt to block the NLRB process in December 2024, according to FreightWaves. A collective bargaining agreement negotiated before BTS's contract was terminated remains technically in effect through the end of April 2026.
Most DSP operators are focused on their scorecard, their cost-per-stop, and their next vehicle lease. The joint employer case is the legal question underneath the business model itself.
What "Joint Employer" Actually Means Under Federal Law
Under the National Labor Relations Act, a company that uses subcontracted labor can be required to recognize and bargain with any union organized by those workers if it has the right to control essential terms and conditions of employment — even if a separate contractor handles the day-to-day relationship. The NLRB's Region 31 found that Amazon exercises exactly that control over DSP drivers: it determines which routes drivers run, how many deliveries they must complete each day, and the deadlines they are required to meet. It communicates all of this directly to drivers via its own app — not through the DSP as an intermediary. Per the NLRB's August 2024 regional finding, that operational architecture makes Amazon a joint employer, not simply a client.
The Teamsters' position, which the NLRB has so far upheld at the regional level, is that Amazon's control over DSP drivers makes it legally obligated to recognize the union and bargain over conditions of employment. The NLRB also alleged in a September 2024 complaint that Amazon violated federal labor law by unlawfully refusing to recognize the union, failing to bargain over the effects of terminating the BTS contract, threatening employees with job loss, and holding captive audience meetings — per the Teamsters' public statements and NLRB case records.
The Legal Sequence So Far
In November 2024, NLRB Region 31 consolidated three separate Teamsters complaints against Amazon into a single action, per FreightWaves. That consolidation signals the agency is treating this as a structural issue with Amazon's delivery model, not an isolated complaint. Amazon sought a federal injunction to halt the proceedings entirely; the Ninth Circuit denied that request in December 2024. As of March 2026, the NLRB proceedings are ongoing and the BTS collective bargaining agreement remains technically in place with an expiration point approaching in April.
It is worth noting one complicating legal thread. The NLRB's broader joint employer rulemaking — the October 2023 final rule that would have established indirect and reserved control as sufficient for joint employer status — was vacated by a federal district court in Texas in March 2024. That ruling narrowed the NLRB's regulatory framework. But it did not invalidate case-by-case determinations like the BTS finding, which proceed on separate legal ground, per Fisher Phillips' analysis of the regulatory sequence. The NLRB's regional findings in the BTS case were made before and independent of the rulemaking, so the Texas court's decision does not automatically undo them.
Why This Matters for Operators Who Aren't in Palmdale
The BTS case does not directly bind every DSP. But the logic embedded in the finding — that Amazon's operational control over routes, volumes, deadlines, and driver communications makes it a co-employer of DSP workers — describes the DSP model as it's structured across the country. If subsequent NLRB regional offices apply the same analysis to organizing campaigns at other stations, the same exposure follows.
The specific conduct Amazon was alleged to have committed at BTS — refusing to recognize union activity, threatening job loss, terminating the DSP contract rather than bargaining — is exactly the kind of conduct that other DSP operators could face if their workers begin organizing. For an operator whose entire business runs on one Amazon contract, the BTS precedent is instructive: when Amazon chose to terminate BTS's contract in the middle of organizing activity, it triggered the unfair labor practice allegations that are now the center of the ongoing proceedings. That contract termination did not end the legal exposure — it became part of it.
The April 2026 expiration of the BTS collective bargaining agreement is the next concrete milestone in this case. How Amazon handles that deadline — whether it negotiates, ignores, or litigates around it — will indicate how it intends to manage the broader DSP labor question.
The Business Model Question Beneath the Legal One
The DSP structure, as documented by the National Employment Law Project in its analysis of Amazon's delivery model, was designed to transfer employment costs, workers' compensation obligations, and liability risk to small independent operators while Amazon retained operational control over the actual work. That design is precisely what the NLRB found creates joint employer status.
For operators, this creates a straightforward diagnostic question: how much of what happens inside your business — wages, scheduling, routing, HR decisions — do you actually control, and how much is Amazon-directed? Operators who have documented independent wage structures, made independent staffing decisions, and built compliance systems that reflect their own judgment are in a different legal position than those who have simply followed Amazon's instructions at every step. That distinction between "Amazon told us how to operate" and "we operate to Amazon's performance standards" is exactly the line that joint employer cases turn on.
You may never face an organizing campaign. But if you do, the business that has been running itself will be in a very different position than the one that has been running Amazon's instructions. Knowing which one you are is not optional.
Sources: FreightWaves (Amazon/NLRB Ninth Circuit reporting, December 2024); NLRB Case 31-CA-319781; International Brotherhood of Teamsters press release, August 2024; Teamsters/PR Newswire statement, October 2024; Fisher Phillips LLP analysis of NLRB joint employer rule vacatur, March 2024; National Employment Law Project analysis of Amazon DSP labor model; HR Daily Advisor, February 2025