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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.
I think the gun pointing to their head is the need to eat and have somewhere to live.
Again, where's the gun to their head to do this contract job?
If you don't have a job, you starve.
That's a gun to the head.
So, are e-unions the future? I hope so. The plutocrats have gotten the upper hand for too long, creating growing inequality. It's time us 95% get some bargaining power back (if GOP doesn't outlaw or de-fang unions & e-unions).
Table-ized A.I.
But the guy they quoted in the article already had a public sector job. Sounds like he was doing it on the side, probably because "public sector" means "I don't need to work much and have a lot of free time".
This is not a bug but a key feature of gig economy.
It is. The "feature" is that by calling workers "independent contractors", Instacart can violate all of the laws set up to make sure that employers don't take advantage of workers. Morality, ethics, and common decency have no place in business-- all that matters is paying workers as little as possible in order for the company to make as much profit as possible.
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.
HMm...I guess I must have missed it in the article, that this was the ONLY job in town for everyone.
Yeah, the asshole libertarians think that a two dollar an hour wage is fine, because of course if people don't like it they can just go get a different job.
This is exactly why people think libertarians are assholes.
>The "feature" is that by calling workers "independent contractors", Instacart can violate all of the laws set up to make sure that employers don't take advantage of workers.
This is an old trick that's so obvious it's not even really a trick. I've been on the wrong end of it myself... and I could have filed an anonymous complaint with the tax authorities over it, but that likely would have tanked the company and I'd have made even less. And honestly, I was making decent money anyway.
The innovation here seems to be using computer dispatching to apply the same model to turning desperate people into a fungible commodity.
HMm...I guess I must have missed it in the article, that this was the ONLY job in town for everyone.
Obviously these folks have a wide range of employment immediately available and choose the lowest paying option. They're just ignoring the better paying alternatives because they enjoy this line of work so much. I'm sure that's what's happening.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
"Doh! Millionaire rock star was just below Instacart driver in the job listings! Why don't I ever follow through??"
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Not so much that, but more that NOT EVERY JOB out there is meant to be made a career of, nor sole source of income to support yourself/family.
This should be common sense, no?
Each job should pay what it is worth. Do you think a burger flipper should make the same as a highly skilled computer programmer?
Should I have to pay $15/hr to get one of the neighborhood kids to pull weeds in my garden one weekend?
Is it worth $30K/yr for someone to put flyers on cars in a parking lot for an hour or two a day?
Seriously, not all jobs are meant or worth paying a wage to live off of....some ARE only for extra money on the side, or starting jobs for teens.
This has been the norm for decades, and only recently for some reason, has everyone started thinking that ANYTHING you could possibly do for money should pay enough to be your sole source of income.
Not all jobs are worth that....
If the individual doesn't like the jobs they are being offered, then THEY need to figure out what to do or what jobs to seek that do give enough compensation to live off of solely.....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
And what's this miraculous set of handcuffs that keeps them from seeking employment elsewhere but still allows them to drive around town where they live now? Is there some forcefield that zaps them back when they try to cross city limits so they can't relocate and look for work elsewhere? Come on guys...if there's no work where you live, that's the invisible hand telling you to move where the work is. People have done it since time immemorial. Whole boat loads and plane loads of people do it now. All the way to the other side of the planet in some cases. We issue hundreds of thousands of work visas every year to Indians and Chinese and Austrailians and Europeans, and hundreds of thousands more immigrant visas. People who want work will find it. What makes you so special that you think the work ought to come to you instead of the other way around?
basic insurance will not cover them like pizza drivers no you need the higher cost Commercial Insurance.
Each job should pay what it is worth. Do you think a burger flipper should make the same as a highly skilled computer programmer?
No. But if he's an adult working full time at the most sophisticated job that he's able to do, he should make enough for food, shelter, and health care. I'm not married to forcing his employer to bear that whole burden.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Still happiness / a comfortable living should be reasonably possible, without having to pay an unreasonable amount for tuition. Something that I think is sadly unattainable for many and getting more so by the day.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
"You seem to think this is a right that everyone is inherently born with...?"
Yes, just like corporations have a right to cheap labor? When did this happen?
"The declaration of the US said it wants to give everyone the "pursuit of happiness", but it doesn't guarantee it,"
That's a 200 year old piece of paper written by people with fleas and wooden teeth. Since when do we worship old ideas while surrounded by technology that can produce everything?
"And if you are such a dense simpleton that you cannot take care of yourself, well....there is always welfare."
Like for car manufacturers and banks? Oh, there's that right to steal from the poor (PS: that's you) to bail out billionaires.
For what it's worth (and I'm sort of a moderate rather than one of these libertarian assholes, more like I see that sometimes they have a partial point to make, kind of like everyone else), the crux of the problem is that the cost of housing and healthcare are skyrocketing. So we are arguing about how we should pay for it instead of trying to figure out why it's so damned expensive.
This is a libertarian insight that the rest of the political spectrum (me, I'm a moderate rather than a libertarian asshole, but they do occasionally have some partial insight, so you ought to at least read what they have to say and dismiss maybe 80% of it that's nonsense and assimilate the 20% nugget of truth out of the turd) could learn: costs increase the fastest in sectors that are the most regulated. And housing costs literally skyrocket in the Bay Area -- the most NIMBYed of them all.
What's more, most of this regulation benefits the already-very-wealthy in the form of real estate appreciation -- and that drives inequality. So not only do housing costs rise faster than people can pay for them, but the benefits go to those that least need them, exacerbating wealth inequality.
Like I said above, I think 80% of libertarianism is overblown. But don't mistake their general prickishness for not having anything valid to add to the discourse.
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.
If he's an adult working full time at the most sophisticated job that he's able to do, he should make enough for food, shelter, and health care
Sophisticated isn't the right word. There are a lot of jobs requiring unskilled/minimally-skilled labor that pay more than flipping burgers, Or where you can get the necessary training at minimal or zero cost ---- the burger flipper role or retail stockboy role are literally jobs for someone who has no marketable skill AND can't make a full-time commitment due to other engagements AND don't have the life experience/employee experience to plan or organize any kind of affairs, because they're a kid in college or something.
Corporations spend a fair amount on political lobbying and pass those costs on to the consumer. Almost every product you buy in certain categories has a hidden "lobbying tax". You are essentially forced to pay it. Workers need a counter version of the same thing.
"Right to work", nice word-play there. Each job you take has pre-conditions that are not negotiable, other than leave. Why should union membership be exempt from such a pattern but other things not?
Table-ized A.I.
You seem to think this is a right that everyone is inherently born with...?
If you're an American working as productively as you're capable of, you deserve food, shelter, and health care. I didn't say it was a "right"; it's just the right thing to do. Some people are born simple and will never make it beyond "burger flipper." They shouldn't be left hungry or have to splint their own broken arm. Like I said, this support doesn't have to be 100% borne by the employer. Leaving the weak to die isn't something a civilized society should do.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Stalin: "Join my party or starve"
Conservatives didn't like it when Stalin did that, but are okay with it in different forms. I see hypocrisy.
USA is the wealthiest (large) country. There is no reason anybody here should starve or die of readily curable illnesses other than Ayn-Randian political beliefs.
Table-ized A.I.
So, you lied about it being "the" guy quoted in "the" article, and it's not even the only guy quoted in that article. But it's ok that you cherry pick out that one guy, and make assumptions about him, because "it has a great breakdown of all the issues". Sure, no problem.
then i wont use their service until they get a decent living wage, either that or if i have no choice to use them then i will give them a nice fat tip, maybe a 20 dollar tip if they bring me my 100 dollars worth of groceries in good condition, i cant condone employees making less than a living wage, i want them to be paid fairly
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
If you have kids before a good job, your purpose is to serve as a warning to others. Better luck next reincarnation.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Should I have to pay $15/hr to get one of the neighborhood kids to pull weeds in my garden one weekend?
Yes. But right now you don't have to, so you're good.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
I know someone who used to brag about how he had a lady who would clean his whole house, wash his dishes, do his laundry, for $5 an hour because she was an illegal alien and was basically desperate for money. Not surprisingly, most people upon hearing this did not rush out to get their own service slave. They just thought to themselves about what a sleaze this person was. That's basically what the gig economy is doing. Finding the people who are the most desperate and taking advantage of their situation. The fact that people are willing to do a job for a low rate does not mean it is right for you to perpetuate that situation. Just because you do it through a flashy app, it doesn't change anything.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Because things were good when the kids were born and no one has a fucking crystal ball? I mean I know you're trying to get at the whole 'you shouldn't have kids if you can't afford them' line but life just isn't that fucking simple for anyone.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
It's the economy, stupid. What has been called a recession is a depression. Former full time employees are scheduled for 20 hours per week to avoid receiving benefits and overtime pay. Minimum wage needs to be $30 per hour so workers can afford food, a car, and a place to live.
If you're a human being working as productively as you're capable of, you deserve food, shelter, and health care. I didn't say it was a "right"; it's just the right thing to do. Some people are born simple and will never make it beyond "burger flipper." They shouldn't be left hungry or have to splint their own broken arm. Like I said, this support doesn't have to be 100% borne by the employer. Leaving the weak to die isn't something a civilized society should do.
Fixed that for you.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
If he's bringing in $500K per year of business, why shouldn't he get paid $100K? Just because there is someone who would do it for $10K? The problem is, there is a lot of talk about paying people what they are worth but it's really all just lip service. People get paid the least that companies can get away with paying them, which isn't anything CLOSE to 'what they are worth'.
Looking at it another way, if Instacart drivers are being paid next to nothing, then it shouldn't hurt Instacart for them to go on strike because they must generate very little of the company's worth.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
That assumes the worker has the resources to turn down bad bargains -- all these fair market arguments about wages have they same false assumption -- that the employee is am an equal bargaining position as the employer. That false assumption can easily be shown: what happens to most employers if they have an unfilled position for a year? vs. what happens to most employees if they are unemployed for a year?
Basically, using the guise of 'independent contractor', companies are skirting our (American) wage regulations and shafting workers whenever and whereever they can. And people wonder where that income disparity is coming from.
This here is a nice shiny example.
Maybe its because they don't see it as 2hr, they see it as taking a gig that involves dropping something off on they way home for the grocery store trip they were making anyway,
Except that's not the way instacart works, any more that Uber works by you pick somebody up on your way to the store.
Indeed. This is why I support something like a BIG - Basic Income Guarantee.
That said, I'm a dirty libertarian who supports a BIG, as I've gone so deep into the looking glass that I came out the other side. It'd be cheaper and provide more liberty than traditional welfare programs.
My basic proposal is to have the BIG be ~$6k per person*, while eliminating the tax rates below 25% and the standard exemption(Deductions stay). The 25% might need to become 26%. Whatever. Neutrality is around $30k of income, where the BIG is neutralized by the extra taxes(same money to federal coffers otherwise). You pay more than $6k substantially sooner than that, of course. It doesn't really increase the taxes of those that make more either. Those earning less than $30k are better off on an even slope, except those that were experts at exploiting our welfare systems before. Response to them: It isn't your right to live alone on the government dime while you're unemployed. GET A JOB. Also, should help with keeping whole families because it wouldn't be like current welfare and encouraging single mothers.
*Yes, this isn't enough to live alone, much less in the bigger more expensive cities. If you want to live alone or in a big city, GET A JOB! Note: Meets the federal poverty line of $24k with a household of four.
I don't read AC A human right
From the Ars article:
shoppers make a per-item fee (typically $0.40)— however, this is not per unit of that item.
Ars spoke with six Instacart shoppers who said that they have routinely been made to pick up several heavy items, such as cases of bottled water, soda, or ice. Those items, of course, not only have to be loaded into a shopping cart, and then into a car, but they must be also hand-carried to someone’s door—sometimes up flights of stairs. Shoppers are still paid a $0.40 per-item fee even if someone orders one, five, or 10 cases of bottled water.
This definition of an "item" creates a windfall for people/businesses ordering lots of things--often heavy, bulky ones. Instacart's pricing scheme makes them a good deal more competitive than typical delivery services, so the customers do the rational thing.
I have to wonder how much this entire issue would smooth out just by changing this into a true per-item fee.
If more young people, didn't have kids too soon before they can afford them
Wrong. The average age at which people have children is going up, and it has been for years. The trend has been toward older parents since at least the 1970s.
Source: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressr...
if they didn't always go out and buy the latest shiny $$$ smart phone, didn't eat out all the time, etc, etc.
Oh, teens and 20-somethings in the 70s didn't blow money on stupid shit? Give me a break.
They did marry earlier though, and it is much easier to save for a house when funneling two incomes into it.
If you don't make Pro Athlete or rock star money, then you should know you can't live even close to that lifestyle and spend money like that.
We are talking about people getting paid $1/hour. I doubt they aspire to a celebrity lifestyle. If anything, they aspire to be free from the ever-present fear of homelessness.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
Family is the answer.
Many people don't have families. Many more poor people have families that are just as poor as they are.
If US becomes totally communist, I will move immediately.
What makes you think you would be allowed to leave?
So we are arguing about how we should pay for it instead of trying to figure out why it's so damned expensive.
It's so damn expensive because we've tried to force fit ideology into it.
Housing is so expensive because we've allowed uncontrolled access to credit, and allowed it to people who never should have had it. That started a megaflation of housing prices.
We have a mutant health care system where people without insurance get their basic healthcare at emergency rooms - the most expensive healthcare on the planet, then the costs, which tehy obviously don't pay are just transferred up teh line, and basic services for the insured are inflated to cover the emergency room healthcare, which is passed on to the insurance companies, who then have to raise insurance rates, which causes more people to enter teh uninsured realm, when makes those people have to go to the emergency rooms for basic healthcare which...... Makes for a perfect example of a positive feedback loop, which never works.
We've demanded that there be no increase in the minimum wage for a long enough time - long enough for all of the basic living expenses to inflate, so that now the grunts working for WalMart and all the other cheap labor giants - are eligible for supplemental benefits. Which you and I pay for in taxes. So we end up with a mutant system that has free market anti-government people who support WalMart's ideology while at the same time supporting WalMart's corporate welfare.
We have people who insist that these are all starting level jobs, never to be made a living off of. It's funny, but growing up, There were lots of people I knew working in the downtown department stores who were making a living off of it. Of course, My father paid around 12 percent of his take home pay on his mortgage. Mine sucked up 50 percent of my take home, and apparently many people were paing much much more.
We have been sold a bill of goods that tells us that if we just apply ourselves, we can be anything we decide we want to be. Which sure as Spandex is a nasty soul crushing lie. Yet trotted out as a meme for anyone who thinks that some of the folks at McDonalds are capable of being rocket scientists, and the only reason they aren't is that they are too lazy.
Then we have this case, where people are refusing to work for the wages offered, and some wag bitches about "Nobody is holding a gun to their head.
That's true, as evidenced by them doing what he says they should do, then pissing and moaning when they do what he says they should do.
When in fact, we either have to help them, or allow them to help themselves. Or just euthanize them. Some of us have a real problem with that last idea. I think there are a fair number of Americans who don't.
This is a libertarian insight that the rest of the political spectrum (me, I'm a moderate rather than a libertarian asshole, but they do occasionally have some partial insight, so you ought to at least read what they have to say and dismiss maybe 80% of it that's nonsense and assimilate the 20% nugget of truth out of the turd) could learn: costs increase the fastest in sectors that are the most regulated.
Hmm, now you have my attention. Perhaps the Bay area is so socialist bureaucracy regulated where the forms have to be filled out with a certain brand pen, but here in the Right coast, we had a different issue, based on lack of regulation.
As an example, My father's mortgage on his house was originated at the local First National Bank. Every payment was made to the local First National Bank. When it was finished, he picked up the Mortgage papers there.
Contrast that with mine. We had a "loan originator" who got paid by how many mortgages he "originated" He couldn't give a flying fig if we were agtually eligible. In fact he was surprised at how good our credit rating was. So we got really great rates. But not everyone did. And our Mortgage was sold a number of times to other banks. Anyh
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Agree 100%, but it's harder to enforce beyond our borders.
Some irony present in this comment, since it's beyond your borders that these notions are more regularly enforced.
The problem is, often so called contractors are legally employees in spite of the smoke and mirrors obfuscation. The law being violated is employment law.
fuck off instacart shill
homeless bums make more per hour collecting cans from a dumpster
That's the economic equivalent of believing that the earth is flat. Thanks for demonstrating your complete and utter ignorance so clearly.
Here is the Forbes article (you know Forbes, right? Not exactly a left-wing-socialist-tool) explaining it: https://www.forbes.com/sites/f...
It would be easier to show this by showing graphs of demand curves, but /., with an old-fashioned text-only interface, doesn't support that. The take-away calculation is that if minimum wage increases, while some businesses will decide not to hire some workers because their productivity now is less than their cost, pay increases for the rest of the minimum wage workers, the ones who had been being paid less than their marginal value. It turns out to be a net win-- the workers not hired are the ones who were producing minimum value.
Real economics is actually somewhat interesting-- you should learn some of it, instead of the oversimplified cartoon economics that libertarians hold so dearly to. You might like it.