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warehouse in New York City's Staten Island borough. Worker safety is also at the center of a strike Monday by workers at an Inc. "I think their actions in the midst of this pandemic really, unfortunately, are being guided by that fear of being legally recognized as an employer if they provide safety trainings, if they provide instrumentalities for safety, et cetera," she said. The company may be trying to tread carefully when offering workers protections to ensure no lines that distinguish them as company employees are being crossed, Dubal said. In California, Instacart is part of a $110-million campaign to fight off a labor law that makes it harder to classify workers as independent contractors. "Instacart knows it’s virtually impossible to meet their qualifications and is ignoring pleas for more substantial and preventative help," the group said.Ĭomplicating matters is the company's ongoing effort to keep treating workers as contractors rather than employees. Gig Workers Collective called for the benefits to be extended beyond next week and said the additional paid sick leave should also be available to workers who hadn't contracted the disease but had a doctor's note saying they had a preexisting condition that could make them more susceptible to severe illness from the coronavirus. "Our goal is to offer a safe and flexible earnings opportunity to shoppers, while also proactively taking the appropriate precautionary measures to operate safely," Instacart said in a statement before the strike started. The 14 days of paid sick leave are available until next week. These concessions came after Instacart said earlier this month that part-time shoppers would be able to accrue sick pay and that workers could get up to 14 days of paid sick leave if they tested positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, or were placed into mandatory quarantine or isolation by a government health agency. The company also said it would remove a default option for no tips, which it said would make it "less likely" that customers would decide not to tip, since they would have to enter zero as the tip amount manually. On Sunday, the San Francisco-based firm said it would provide workers with hand sanitizer and would change the customer tip setting so it would default to the percentage the customer last used - or if the customer last tipped less than 5%, it would default to 5%. As The Times reported, in addition to Instacart shoppers, several Amazon and DoorDash workers say the companies aren't doing enough to keep them safe or compensate them for the health risks involved with delivering goods during the outbreak. Instacart workers are among the many couriers and on-demand contractors who are demanding more protections as customers become increasingly reliant on their services. Accusing the company of "fail to respond to Shoppers in a way that is respectful, moral, or even just considerate to other human beings," Gig Workers Collective said the stoppage would continue. Montalvo declined to comment directly on the workers' demand for an additional $5 per order in hazard pay. "Over the last 72 hours, more groceries were sold on our platform than ever before," said Instacart spokesperson Natalia Montalvo. The company also cited record-breaking sales. It's unclear whether that number represents workers who fulfilled orders Monday, or simply those who were online. A group that helped organize the strike, Gig Workers Collective, said that "at minimum thousands of workers" participated in the stoppage on its first day.īut Instacart said that in spite of the strike there were 40% more workers on the platform today than the same time last week. "They've become so essential to so many people and are probably the only people that many of us are in contact with in the state of self-isolation."īut it's unclear how widespread participation in the current strike has been, or whether customers are heeding calls to honor it by holding off on placing orders. "This is a different moment because of what really is at stake," Veena Dubal, an associate professor of law at UC Hastings, said.

With a backlog of orders in some of Instacart's biggest markets, workers would appear to have a degree of leverage they have lacked in the past, when previous labor actions achieved only modest concessions.