Instacart is reportedly laying off nearly 2,000 shop buyers, including all of its workers who voted to unionize last February, in an unprecedented story for the food delivery platform.
As seen by Motherboard, Instacart buried the news of impending layoffs in a blog post on Tuesday, describing broader changes in the way the company does business with traders. As Instacart rapidly grew its operations in the midst of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, major supermarket chains are increasingly shifting to using their own employees, as opposed to Instacart store customers, to fulfill orders placed through the platform Instacart online. Now, Instacart says that, among other changes, it is expanding its collection services along the sidewalk to help partner grocery stores to fulfill orders internally, and several are converting exclusively to this “Partner Choice” model.
“As a result of the transition from some grocery stores to the Partner Pick model, we will be closing our store operations at selected retail locations in the coming months,” said Instacart. “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.”
Last year, a group of Instacart workers at a Mariano’s grocery store in Skokie, Illinois, decided to unionize by 10 votes to 4, per motherboard. United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, a labor group representing Instacart union workers, among others, said Thursday that Instacart informed the chapter that it was laying off about 366 Instacart workers in Kroger’s own stores across the country, including those at the Skokie Mariano store.
Instacart is laying off about 1,800 of its 10,000 customers in stores across the United States and will offer as little as $ 250 in severance, by a letter UFCW shared a labor lawyer who represents Instacart.
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The company’s decision to fire its only unionized employees and a number of frontline workers in the midst of an international pandemic is “just wrong,” UFCW President Marc Perrone said in a statement.
“As a union of Instacart grocery workers in the Chicago area and grocery workers across the country, UFCW is asking Instacart to immediately discontinue these plans and put the health of its customers first, protecting the jobs of these brave essential workers at a time when our communities need them most, ”he said.
Given that unionized employees are already a rarity in the gig economy, this change is likely to sad workers among other big players like DoorDash, Uber and others, who may be looking to form their own unions. Instacart’s only union buyers in Skokie were still negotiating their first contract with the company when news of the layoffs arrived.
“These layoffs are totally disheartening for any employee who is trying to do something to make this job better,” said one employee to Motherboard on condition of anonymity.
In turn, Instacart says that the choice of its employees to unionize had zero influence on their dismissal decisions, according to a company spokesman. It is hard to believe for obvious reasons, especially as the company was supposedly caught running a campaign against the union just before last February’s vote. Several senior managers at Instacart distributed anti-union materials to workers listing propaganda about the impacts of joining a union, via Motherboard.
Now, less than a year later, the same employees who failed Note that these threatening memos are unemployed in the midst of a global health crisis. You do the math.