Instacart’s gig workers are planning a nationwide strike
vice.com
vice.com
The whole way delivery works is broken right now.
In New York, we have Caviar [1][2], a mid-tier to premium food-delivery company. They differentiated based on premium food. I haven't heard any complaints from their delivery staff, though this may be on account of their size.
Is there a premium player in the grocery delivery business? Something like FreshDirect, but with better service?
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square,_Inc.#Caviar_restaurant...
This is probably the key part. Does Caviar pay their drivers more than other sites? The cynic in me suggests that no, they don’t. Maybe, maybe, they get better tips as a result of delivering premium food.
In fact the only correlation I've noticed is when the recipient seems like a decent person, combined with you having to go trough an extraordinary amount of trouble, like getting on a hill at the edge of the city, or having to navigate trough a confusing maze in a giant office complex.
But then again sometimes you deliver in the night trough a thunderstorm an orbital amount of stuff for a party, and get nothing.
That's interesting.
If there was a sufficient market for all of this to work out, it probably would have existed before Instacart. Instacart provides no innovation, other than dumping investor money on the market, and externalizing a lot of cost and risk onto gig workers, thereby making the price of delivery somewhat worthwhile ... for now. The moment the workers are paid reasonably and/or the VC subsidy runs out, what then?
Since when do the unit metrics on this business add up?
Never. Without VC money or gig workers who do not understand the costs of depreciation this model does not work for something as low margin as groceries.
At 10% margin, which is insane for groceries, you’d need a $100+ order to breaking even the cost of delivery. Forget actually making a profit. And real margins are closer to 2-3%.
I don't understand how most of those things are "true costs" at all.
This type of work is ideal for college students, who are typically still on their parents health insurance, or as supplementary work for someone who already has a full time job and wants to work a few extra hours.
Unemployment doesn't even make sense in this context because you work whatever hours you want and they don't really do layoffs. Even if the company went out of business, there are several others offering the same type of work immediately to anyone.
Gas costs money, but how much is highly dependent on vehicle type and people doing this type of work have the obvious incentive to use higher efficiency vehicles where the gas for this kind of trip would cost less than $1, and for the same reason to choose more reliable vehicles with below average maintenance costs.
The way you get really gnarly cost estimates is by using the same depreciation models that corporations do when they buy new vehicles for the sole purpose of making deliveries -- because you then lose $10,000 or more in value over the first few years of ownership regardless of mileage or anything else you do. But for someone using a personal vehicle they would need regardless, that huge reduction in value due to age is already a sunk cost.
And it is a bad deal for anyone who is trying to make a long-term career out of it, but the people expecting to do that should look elsewhere for employment. Not every job is a career, and why should it have to be?
It is better for jobs with high flexibility and low compensation to exist for the people who want them. The people who need less flexibility and more compensation should choose different jobs.
This argument sounds like a lot like the argument against raising minimum wage ("it's not meant to be enough to survive on"), however the reality is that large numbers of these gigs/jobs are worked by adults who depend on it as a primary source of income, and in the face of the massive and sudden job losses we're seeing, it's quite callous to say they should "just choose different jobs".
If the Instacarts and Ubers of the world cannot afford to pay these people appropriately then their business model is a failure.
Given that it's sustainable if they do, what's wrong with letting those people be the ones who do it? Why is anybody who needs a long-term full-time job required to do this instead of working at Walmart or going to college or learning a trade? Why should we even want to encourage that? It's low-paying work open to anyone who needs immediate income with flexible hours. Let it be what it is.
> and wear-and-tear on a vehicle will manifest as a mechanical fault one day.
Which, for a modern reliable vehicle, you amortize over many thousands of miles. If you're doing this in a 1980s Land Rover, you're doing it wrong.
> This argument sounds like a lot like the argument against raising minimum wage ("it's not meant to be enough to survive on"), however the reality is that large numbers of these gigs/jobs are worked by adults who depend on it as a primary source of income, and in the face of the massive and sudden job losses we're seeing, it's quite callous to say they should "just choose different jobs".
How is it any less callous than saying that most of them should lose their jobs and the rest of them should lose their flexibility? That's what happens if you start requiring a bunch of recurring insurance costs, which increases hiring costs and reduces demand for workers (which lowers overall wages across the economy), and induces the company to schedule the remaining workers during the hours that maximize returns to cover the higher costs instead of letting them work when and how long they actually want to.
I mean, suppose you have millions of college students who need some income. For example, Bob has class from 9AM to 10:30AM, drives for five hours, then has another class at 3:30PM. He drives 30 hours a week like this. You force insurance on him and that job becomes 40 hours scheduled at the company's convenience, which doesn't fit his class schedule, so he needs a different job. The different job is working a contiguous 8 hour shift in an office from 6PM to 2AM -- which fits into his schedule, and actually pays better than driving did, but he preferred driving even with lower pay because the hours for the better-paying job stink. He doesn't get home until 2:30AM and has class at 9AM, and it's 40 hours instead of 30 when he had been using the other 10 hours to study. The people using the better paying job as an actual job also prefer that a million Bobs not need it, because Bob will work for $15/hour when that job used to pay $20/hour, so now half of them lose their jobs to Bobs and the other half get paid less.
Constraining choices pretty much always makes workers worse off. It's worse for everybody. The choices they're forced into in the alternative already exist and they're not choosing them to begin with because the alternatives are not actually better.
It helps that I live 2 blocks from the grocery store, but I very much prioritize grocery store distance when choosing apartments.
Of course, during these epidemic times I've flipped my habits around and buying 1-2 weeks worth at a time to minimize exposure, but that's not my normal way of buying groceries. I'm not usually good at predicting what my stomach feels like having 2 days later.
Certainly the instacart workers helped me the last two weeks shut in, it's the least we can do.
Also the pay is crap, and you sometimes end up with orders of multiple cases of bottled water that are very difficult & time consuming to wrangle, and you'll get paid the same as if they bought the equivalent dollar amount worth of breakfast cereal. Customers frequently don't tip.
I found Uber & Lyft to be a far, far easier job for probably twice as much pay. Of course, right now I'm doing none of it. Fortunately my S.O. finally found a decent job and is able to work from home.
https://www.wolfbaldwin.com/articles/small-business-articles...
>"As we previously shared, we’re offering up to 14 days of pay for any hourly employee or full-service shopper who is diagnosed with COVID-19 or placed in individual mandatory isolation or quarantine, as directed by a local, state, or public health authority."[1]
So there is no benefits for workers who develop symptoms and self isolate? This statement reads like you have to go a hospital and be fortunate enough to be able to get a test. In many hotspots there is a shortage of tests. There also seems to be any mention of providing hand sanitizer, gloves, masks etc to these workers.
If you read the "previously shared" link in the above it states:
>"All Instacart part-time employees now have access to sick pay, an accrued benefit that can be used as paid time off if you are absent from work due to illness or injury. We’ve previously offered sick pay in select states — now, all part-time employees across North America, including in-store shoppers, will be able to accrue sick time to use as needed in the event that they become ill. All sick pay accrual will be backdated from the start of the year, so all hours worked by our in-store shoppers since then will count towards their current, individual sick pay balance."
An "accrued" benefit that will be backdated to the beginning of the year(we're only in month 3 of the year.)I'm guessing this would yield maybe 2 or 3 days max. That barely puts a dent into two weeks of self-isolation and no work.
This all rings quite hollow.
[1] https://medium.com/shopper-news/shopper-health-safety-update...
Every company that’s using testing as a precondition for benefits, when testing has been widely reported to be unavailable, is despicable.
In the evening that night I went to the local hospital emergency. They had an area specifically for covid testing.
With 30 minutes I was tested, and told I needed to have 5 days off work. If the test was negative the government would pay for the sick time. If I was positive my company’s normal sick leave would need to cover it. I was negative and back at work, no cost to me.
Gig working will continue to exploit businesses, workers, and consumers until we solve the problem that made it a viable business model: income inequality.
If people didn't need multiple part time jobs to survive, they wouldn't be working these terrible conditions. And when that stops, businesses (like restaurants) will also stop being abused by predatory gig-fueled companies (like grubhub). And if people didn't need to make extra cash with Uber, there'd be enough tax money to fund better public transit, which further levels the economic playing field.
Is there going to be any change to that?
This legislation doesn't change that, but it likely pulls some of those gig workers out of the system, as they might collect more on unemployment than working limited gig work available. TBD if this puts supply pressures on platforms.
Personal opinion: The stimulus is generous enough it's going to cause gig platforms to bleed out, as the stimulus is directed at the workers, not at the platforms. Bird is already performing mass layoffs. [1]
Which I'm happy that we are doing, these are real persons after all, but then we must necessarily dismantle them afterwards to make sure it doesn't repeat.
This was specifically advocated for by Senator Sanders. He threatened to tighten the restrictions even further on the $500 billion bailout of corporations if this condition was not met.
https://twitter.com/RespectableLaw/status/124303461436252569...
Looking at the Senate record[0] I can't see anything about the Senator and there doesn't seem to be any news coverage of his involvement in the bill other than the fact that he missed procedural votes for the initial draft.
[0] https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/354...
* Senators Hoeven and Stabenow secured the $9.5 billion and other aid for the agricultural industry.
* Senators Thune and Warner pushed for the new tax benefit for employers helping employees pay off student loans.
* Senator Shelby got a cap on funds being used for dredging work on harbors removed.
* Senator Leahy ensured every state got a minimum of $1.5 billion in funds so small states weren't left out.
* Senator Booker got the Bureau of Prisons to making videoconferencing free for inmates.
Obviously Secretary Mnuchin and Senator Schumer did most of the heavy lifting.
I can't find anything about Senator Sanders, and that clip is from after the unemployment provisions were already in the bill. The Senator didn't mention anywhere in that speech that he pushed for the inclusion of the unemployment provisions. He actually said "this isn't the bill I would have written," which I personally would have followed up on with an explanation of what I did to make the bill better if I had worked on it.
Bailouts don't have to go mostly to politically connected rich turds. Somehow they always do...
Besides, the fix for the corrupt broken system does not exist in the corrupt broken system.
When there are a ton of people looking for work it is not really a good time to be striking
Whoever the person running that account is, they are not interested in you knowing all of the facts. I assure you.
There never was a union. Some people on the team wanted to form one, but most did not. It caused huge cultural issues and tension across the team, and the pro-union employees were very loud and went to VICE pretty much any time they had any minor complaint about the company (which VICE would of course eat right up).
Now Everlane is being framed as union-busting... when it was their own employees that couldn’t form or didn’t want a union. Everlane has always been fine with it, if that’s what the team wanted.
If you see a new or renovated hotel next to an old one, which one will you stay in? If an airline keeps flying old planes and the other airlines invest in new, nicer planes, which one will you choose to fly on?
We see this story play out on these very Hacker News forum, where the common mantra is businesses that don’t invest in the future, that don’t spend on R&D, that don’t take risks deserve to die out and new businesses that did take risks deserve to take their place.
Then how come competition doesn’t produce better products?
Strike is a worker's right
I don't understand how such a thing happens in any democratic society.
Do workers really not like the idea of collective bargaining, or are there more business owners than workers in your state/country?
Since the gutting of private-sector unions, the average American’s exposure to collective bargaining is public employee union strikes.
Unionized employees realized it is better we get more now and take less if/when we make it to the top(which won't happen anyways).
Public-sector unions should not be a thing.
Why don't you abolish them?
This is a pulmonary infectious disease. Meaning that the virus is airborne.
If you are infected, then every breath you exhale, every laugh or word you speak, every sneeze or cough you make, can transmit the virus into the air, inside the room that you are in. And it may take 3 hours before the virus particles settle on the ground.
And you don’t know who is infected.
The only way to be safe, and conduct some sort of normal transactions in public, is if everyone wears a mask while in public, and maintain some distance between each other. That way, the mask keeps the virus relatively contained to yourself, while providing some minimal barrier of protection from others.
The reason why the CDC does not recommend this, is because of the mask shortage. They want to keep enough available to the health care workers. Which I understand, but if the public also uses a mask, then it would also minimize or slow down the infection rate.
If you are working in public, or even if you are doing grocery shopping for yourself, then I highly advise to protect yourself, to take this issue seriously, and wear a mask.
Nobody is "sending in" gig workers. Isnt the whole point of gig work that the worker can choose whether to pick up a gig and go in or not?
“Lol”- these gig workers don’t have the same choices your typical google or Facebook or even Fortune 500 IT guy have.
In fact I would suspect many have been pushed to the margins of society and are only “choosing” gig work because the only other option is that their families face hunger, homelessness, or worse.
Some but not most:
https://laborunionreport.com/2019/04/23/eight-of-the-top-10-...
> Nobody is "sending in" gig workers. Isnt the whole point of gig work that the worker can choose whether to pick up a gig and go in or not?
Oh yes, the US economy, in its majestic equality, allows the rich as well as the poor to expose themselves to a dangerous, novel virus in exchange for low wage work.
I'm pro gig work. I've done it for about eight years and it made it possible for me to have earned income at all under enormously difficult circumstances (while ill and homeless).
But I'm also aware that it only works that way when the system is designed to allow for that. Many platforms aren't designed that way.
The actual cost of living (food, utilities, and home maintenance) is quite low compared to the amount that just gets funneled upwards as rent. This rent treadmill has been created by decades of artificially low interest rates, an explicit government policy.
Sadly most of this surplus doesn't even go to Scrooge Mcducks swimming in vaults of wealth, but rather gets wasted in a distributed fashion on fake office jobs.
It's a strong grocers union, but does not cover Instacart and other gig workers.
Wishing them the best of luck.
That's unfortunate that they don't cover gig workers. A good chunk of our employment is now in "gig work".
For my side, I guess I could point to the fact that Walmart workers as a whole have never been able to unionize, mostly due to the intervention of Walmart. (https://populardemocracy.org/news/how-walmart-persuades-its-...)
https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/10/gig-workers-collective/
I have a hard time believing in such a short time they were able to organize anything resembling a majority.
It's great for consumers via low prices, and investors via returns.
But it's a problem on the whole.
Sadly, I feel if these people were paid a decent wage, the price would be high enough the market would be tiny.
I'm not sure if the long-run economics add up very well here.
I'm certainly not tempted to do so now.
I know I'll get downvoted for exposing my point of view, but I'm one of the many people who do not tip the delivery man, so I really hope that they obtain better wages from their employers.
Your principled act of rebellion will produce not reform of commercial culture, but only distress for those who serve you -- and for yourself.
I hope that eventually there will be successful push back. That may be part of what Bernie Sanders' movement is about.
But I think that within a decade or so the reality is that we will have more advanced robots (combined with warehouses designed for automation) that can do most of these jobs, including driving and delivery. Not saying it isn't incredibly challenging or that we are anywhere close, but there is progress and also massive, massive financial incentive.
At some point UBI will be the obvious option to everyone. It seems obvious to me that income should not start at absolute zero even now.
Not only that, they're using enterprise signed ios apps for their shoppers and deliverers which requires them to do the settings -> trust app thing to run the app. Seems similar to what made Apple revoke Google and FBs enterprise cert for a while, very sketchy. You're only supposed to use enterprise signed apps for actual employees. It seems these "gig workers" aren't considered actual employees by the company but when it comes to abusing the cert it's ok? Apple should revoke their cert until they get an actual deliverer/shopper app.
Edit: Seems I've angered some Instacart folks, care to respond about the issues on the web ui, app, and usage of the enterprise cert for signing your deliverer/shopper app?