Photographer: Tiffany Hagler-Geard / Bloomberg
Photographer: Tiffany Hagler-Geard / Bloomberg
Instacart Inc. is cutting jobs for some 1,900 employees, including 10 workers who recently formed a union, while the company seeks to increase its number of contract workers.
The grocery delivery company already classifies most of its workers as independent contractors, whose numbers rose to more than 500,000 during the coronavirus pandemic. But as of 2015, the company hired a small subset of workers as employees, who, under US law, are entitled to protections such as minimum wages and may be subject to further guidance and training from their boss. “What we found is that our customers need training and supervision, which is how you improve the quality of the harvest,” said Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta at the time. “You cannot do that when they are hired independently.”
Now, Instacart is moving in the other direction, eliminating 1,877 employee positions, including those of 10 workers in Illinois who last year became the first in the country to vote for union membership at the company. The company said it was doing so as part of a move towards new models, such as providing its technology to retailers so that their own employees would prepare customer orders.
“We know that this is an incredibly challenging time for many as we move through the Covid-19 crisis and we are doing everything we can to support the store’s customers during this transition,” said the company in an e-mailed statement. . Instacart said it is providing compensation packages and looking to place affected workers in open positions within the company or working directly with retailers. Instacart said it would still have thousands of customers classified as employees after making the move, but declined to provide further details.
The United Food & Commercial Workers union, which represents workers in Illinois, condemned the move, saying it eliminates about a fifth or more of the positions of Instacart’s frontline employees in the United States. “Instacart firing the company’s only unionized workers and destroying the jobs of nearly 2,000 dedicated front-line workers in the midst of this public health crisis is just wrong,” wrote Marc Perrone, the union president, in an emailed statement .
San Francisco-based Instacart and other show companies, including Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc. last year financed a successful $ 200 million campaign to pass an electoral measure in California that exempted them from a state law that stated that workers were employed if they worked on the “normal course” of their business. bosses. Encouraged by this victory, companies are pushing for similar changes elsewhere that would make it easier to claim that workers are hired.
(Updates with additional comments from Instacart in the fourth paragraph.)