Photographer: Tiffany Hagler-Geard / Bloomberg
Photographer: Tiffany Hagler-Geard / Bloomberg
Instacart Inc. it cuts about 1,900 employees, including 10 workers who recently formed a union as the company tries to increase its number of contract workers.
The food delivery company already classifies most of its workers as independent contractors, whose numbers rose to more than 500,000 during the coronavirus pandemic. But since 2015, the company they have hired a small subset of workers as employees, who, under US law, are entitled to protections such as the minimum wage and may be subjected to more direction and training by their boss. “What we have found is that our buyers need training and supervision, as you improve the quality of the collection,” said Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta. “You can’t do that when they’re independent contractors.”
Now, Instacart is moving in the other direction, eliminating 1,877 employee positions, including those of 10 Illinois workers who last year became the first in the country to vote for unionization with the company. The company said it is doing so as part of a shift to new models, such as providing its technology to retailers for their workers to prepare customer orders.
“We know this is an incredibly difficult time for many as we go through the Covid-19 crisis and do everything we can to support in-store shoppers through this transition,” the company said in an email. Instacart said it is providing redundancy packages and is looking to place affected workers in open positions within the company or work directly for retailers. Instacart said it would still have thousands of buyers classified as employees after the change was made, but declined to provide further details.
The United Food & Commercial Workers Union, which represents workers in Illinois, has condemned the move, saying it eliminates about a fifth or more of the positions of American employees on the front line of Instacart. “Instacart’s dismissal of the company’s only unionized workers and the destruction of the jobs of nearly 2,000 front-line workers in the midst of this public health crisis is simply wrong,” said Marc Perrone, the union’s president, in a statement. -mail.
Instacart from San Francisco and other concert companies, including Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc. last year funded a successful $ 200 million campaign to adopt a California voting measure that exempted them from a state law that says workers are employed if they work in the “regular course” of their bosses’ business. Encouraged by this victory, companies are pushing for similar changes elsewhere, which would make it easier to claim that workers are contractors.
(Updates with additional Instacart comment in the fourth paragraph.)