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Dark Side of Gig Economy: Some Instacart Workers Go On Strike Over Pay That Can Be as Low as $1 Per Hour (fastcompany.com)
From a report: Instacart shoppers and drivers -- the people who gather your groceries and deliver them to you after you order via the Instacart app -- are on strike. While independent contractors can't technically strike, via a Facebook group some of the company's thousands of employees have organized a "no delivery day" in the hopes of getting higher wages, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The strike is only taking place in a few of the 154 cities nationwide that Instacart operates in. The action may be small, but the grievances are big. While Instacart, the 5-year-old San Francisco startup, is valued at $3.4 billion, it allegedly pays its workers as little as $1 per order. Ars Technica has a great breakdown of all the issues surrounding how Instacart employees get paid and it's complex, with three different income streams coming together Voltron-like to form a wage. The result, though, is that some shoppers are being paid less than the federal minimum wage, like a Jackson, Miss., worker who put in a 19-hour week in Jackson, Mississippi, that paid out $37.75 (roughly $2/hour). That's far below the $14/hour wage that Ars Technica says Instacart is targeting.
The only way it's economically viable for most people to get someone else to go shopping at a retail store for them is to pay that person much, much less than it otherwise would cost conventionally to do that.
The gig economy seems entirely oriented around pay schemes that are so complicated that most of the people signing up to do the work can't figure out up front they won't make any money doing the work.
If the business model is only viable when you effectively have slaves working for you, it's not a good business model.
Jobs that are supposedly only for 'teenagers' to make extra money have been mostly worked by adults for years now. Pulling weeds is basically gardening. You can hire kids to do it for cheap for all sorts of reasons, like they don't have to actually feed themselves or pay rent. When kids are young, it's kind of a fun thing to do so they can make some money and learn about working. But if you hire an adult to do it, they're going to charge you an hourly rate appropriate for a landscaper, and you can pay it or not. Maybe my job as a programmer deserves more money than a burger flipper, but I want that burger flipper to make enough so that when they go home after their 8 hours of real, legitimate work, they can afford to buy the video games that I make.
If the job is worth doing, it's probably worth paying for. If you can't because it's too expensive or you're too frugal, then do it yourself or don't get it done.
My local grocery store delivers (I think they even offer it free to seniors), and I imagine that those people are getting paid whatever the normal wage is at the store. Shopping for stuff, driving it somewhere and delivering it is a REAL JOB. Even just delivering things is a job that we pay people to do at *better* than minimum wage!
Instacart is not on the right side of this. Making workers deliver 20 cases of water for $3-4 is immoral. If these jobs are the kind that 'job creators' come up with when they get tax cuts, they can stuff them and pay more taxes.
In CA the state government has an administration (CA GSA) that exists only to warehouse useless workers.
They _can't_ fire them, the cheapest solution is to just transfer the air thieves to the GSA. It's a six story, full city block building just south of Broadway in Sacramento. Nothing gets done, but they are out of the way.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'