Instacart to provide better safety equipment for shoppers.
Workers group calls promise “far cry” from adequate
After a walkout this week by workers over coronavirus-safety issues and pay, groceries-to-your-door giant Instacart says it will provide free face masks, hand sanitizer and forehead thermometers to the people who shop for and deliver food to households.
The cotton-and-polyester masks will be washable and reusable and won’t affect supplies for health care professionals, the company said this week. The reusable forehead thermometers will provide an accurate reading in about 15 seconds, according to the San Francisco company. The shopping-and-delivery workers, which Instacart calls “shoppers,” will be able to order the safety items online starting next week, the firm said in a statement Thursday.
The move follows labor action this week by a group of workers demanding $5 per order pandemic hazard pay, plus a boost to the default tip amount in the app, increased and extended pay for shoppers having “a doctor’s note for either a preexisting condition that’s a known risk factor (for COVID-19) or requiring a selfquarantine,” and coronavirus-safety supplies.
The workers’ group called Instacart’s promise of safety items “a far cry from adequate” and “the cheapest way for Instacart to attempt to generate good PR.”
“At least four different groups of in-store shoppers have received notice this week that they may have been exposed to COVID-19 on the job, so this is a step in the right direction,” the group said in a Medium post> It did not identify the locations of what it said were possible exposures.
“There is still no meaningful progress in protections for the shoppers who will fall ill. We are still without any sort of hazard pay, without accessible sick leave, without quarantine pay for those with a doctor’s note, and the in-app default tip amount is still not 10%.”
The group said it wasn’t clear how many sets of safety supplies Instacart had, and when shoppers would get them.
“Instacart did add hand sanitizer to their internal online store for shoppers this week, but it immediately sold out,” the group said.
Instacart has previously said it was offering up to 14
days’ pay for any shopper diagnosed with COVID-19 or placed by authorities in mandatory isolation or quarantine. The firm also said it would give shoppers bonuses of $25 to $200, based on number of hours worked from March 15 to April 15. Shoppers’ earnings “have been increasing considerably as customer demand has surged over the past few weeks,” the company said March 27 in a Medium post.
The walkout launched Monday came amid a years-long series of disputes starting in 2016 between Instacart and its shoppers over pay and tip settings. In 2017, the company, without admitting wrongdoing, agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit by shoppers over alleged improprieties with tips, expense reimbursement, and a service fee said to look like a tip but instead going to the firm.
In November, workers who had walked off the job over a tipping dispute said the company cut a bonus program in retaliation for the job action. Instacart said removal of the $3 bonus for five-star customer reviews was not done in retaliation, but because the bonus program “did not meaningfully improve quality.”
The company and its shoppers are also in conflict over California’s AB-5 “gig worker” law, which classifies many workers as employees entitled to benefits rather than as independent contractors. A state court judge in San Diego ruled in a February preliminary injunction that Instacart was probably misclassifying shoppers as contractors instead of employees.