Instacart will fire its only unionized workers as part of a plan to fire nearly 1,900 employees in supermarkets across the country.
The grocery delivery company employs several thousand customers who pack purchase orders at stores for collection or delivery. This is different from the approximately 500,000 independent contractors who pick up items from various locations and deliver them to customers.
Instacart unveiled plans this week to fire about 1,877 of those customers at the store as part of a change in the way food retailers use their services. Affected employees work in stores that will start using their own employees to fulfill collection requests made through Instacart, the company says.
Among them are 10 shoppers at a Mariano’s grocery store in Skokie, Illinois, who became the only Instacart employees to join a union last year.
Instacart says the cuts had nothing to do with the fact that workers are unionized. But the move outraged the International Union of Food and Commercial Workers, which represents Mariano’s employees and pushed for stronger protections for food workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Instacart dismissing 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 simply wrong,” Marc Perrone, the union’s international president, said in a statement.
The Mariano’s store is one of several at the supermarket giant Kroger, where about 366 Instacart customers will be cut in mid-March, according to a letter from Instacart lawyers sent to UFCW on Tuesday.
The San Francisco-based startup – which is reportedly preparing to go public this year – said the layoffs resulted from retailers’ decision to fulfill orders with their own employees, not Instacart.
But it’s also “significantly more expensive on a cost-per-delivery basis” for Instacart to use store customers in certain places compared to its full-service providers, who can fulfill orders and deliver them instead of picking up items from workers based stores, lawyer Joseph Santucci said in his letter to the union.
Instacart says it will transfer the dismissed customers to other stores where it has open positions or try to help them be hired by the retailer who runs its current store. Those cut will receive compensation ranging from $ 250 to $ 750, depending on experience, Santucci wrote.
“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 Instacart in a statement.