On Oct. 16, 13,000 workers for the app-based grocery delivery service Instacart went on strike. Despite the precarity of gig work and the absence of an official union, Instacart’s independent contractors known as “shoppers” organized to walk off the job in protest against the company’s unjust working conditions and a sharp decline in pay.
Brought together by the non-profit labor group Gig Workers Collective, Instacart’s shoppers are putting forth five simple demands. Included among them are calls for a return to commission-based pricing instead of algorithmically determined pay; occupational death benefits, and an improved rating system that does not penalize shoppers for issues beyond their control. Other demands uncover the depths of Instacart’s improprieties.
Since the beginning of 2021, shoppers such as Daniel Feuer of Durham, Ontario have noticed a distinct and mysterious drop in their earnings, despite working the same or more hours as in previous years. By tracking his work time and pay over the course of months, Feuer determined Instacart was changing factors behind the scenes to cut labour costs, and said as much in an open letter to Instacart CEO Fidji Simo.
The app claims it has not altered its pay structure since early 2019 but this is not true, as many other shoppers have since discovered. Instead of earning a minimum pay of $7 per order like they were before, now shoppers are paid the same amount for an entire batch of orders which can take several times as long to complete and can require far more driving to deliver. A job that would once pay $15 to $20 now pays $7—and Instacart pockets the difference.
These tactics are nothing new for Instacart. As Sharon Goen, a shopper based in Las Vegas, Nevada, lays out, “My pay has gone down 70 per cent since I started four years ago. It used to be that anything over 24 items, you get a bump in pay. Now, it’s $7 a batch. I saw one the other day that had 77 unique items, 100 units, for $7. You can’t go through the store and get 77 items in 15 minutes. You’re there for an hour and a half.”
Daniel Feuer agrees. “It’s disgusting,” he said, “and the only thing that makes these batches worthwhile and able for a lot of people to make a living is the tips customers provide.”
Tips are another point of contention with the striking shoppers. While tips can be input manually, Instacart has set the default tip amount to five per cent, short of the 10 per cent it once was. Most customers will use the default option if given a chance, and the resulting fall in income has hit shoppers even harder. They are demanding the return of a default 10 per cent tip and the pay per order (rather than per batch) structure as part of the strike.
For its part, Instacart refuses to acknowledge the need for these changes. According to Natalia Montalvo, director of shopper engagement and communications, “Based on the ongoing investments we’ve made to support shoppers, these claims do not reflect the current shopper experience, and in some cases, the demands are for offerings that already exist on the platform.”
At the same time as the app was squeezing its workforce, Instacart doubled its value to $39 billion, thanks in no small part to a reduction in labour costs. The company also laid off the only shoppers to be considered actual employees of Instacart in the spring of 2021, a full 1,877 workers including 376 that were unionized through a deal with Kroger.
This most recent strike is only the latest in a long list of labour actions taken against Instacart since its founding in 2012. In 2019, a similar strike was organized and while the walkout admittedly did not affect Instacart’s service in any way, some small concessions were made by the company. A few days later, Instacart eliminated a $3 bonus that shoppers could receive for a five-star review, a policy change they claim was already scheduled but which organizers say was a clear act of retaliation.
The tech giant can attack workers this way due to its hold on its workforce. When the pandemic reached North America, Instacart contracted 300,000 more shoppers to deal with increased demand, bringing the total number of independent contractors to 500,000. As customers adapted to a pandemic life, Instacart found itself with an army of surplus labor it could leverage for higher profits. With so many shoppers available, competition is fierce and batches are snapped up within seconds of being ordered, even if they pay only a fraction of what they did before. Any misstep by a shopper, perceived or otherwise, can result in serious repercussions from Instacart or the customer, resulting in a further loss of income. This all makes for a very unstable work environment, which Instacart can then capitalize on to lower wages.
Or as one shopper identifying only as Jen from Massachusetts put it, “Instacart doesn’t care. It’s a revolving door. It’s like a sweat factory. They’ll put in 100, fire 10, and put 100 more back in. They are soulless when it comes to their frontline workers. It’s just not OK. We’re human beings and we deserve to be treated like such.”
In a time when decent jobs are scarce it is all the more impressive that thousands of precarious workers chose to strike. The app-based gig economy is perfectly constructed to exploit its workers. While selling gig work through its flexible hours and soft hiring practices, tech companies like Instacart, Uber, and Skip the Dishes can contract hundreds of thousands of workers without having to provide insurance, benefits, or the right to collective bargaining. This is all to maximize profits at the expense of its independent contractors. But workers are fighting back, demanding to have the basic rights that should be afforded to all working people.
Down with exploitative gig work! Solidarity with striking Instacart shoppers!
