Instacart changes how it pays shoppers, but many say they’re now making less
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"Instacart and other companies like it save millions annually by not having to pay for employee benefits, like Social Security withholdings, unemployment insurance premium payment, workers' compensation, and more."
Race to the bottom with the people who actually DO THE WORK getting less and less.
Race to the bottom with the people who actually DO THE WORK getting less and less.
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I see people, who I'm assuming are instacart shoppers, shopping at the Whole Foods in Boulder. So they're probably the ones who "pioneered" the Boulder model and suffered for it.
Sometimes in the middle of the day, there's as many shoppers working for pay as there are people shopping themselves.
It's strange ... Especially hard to see paying an additional markup on Whole Foods beyond the base markup ...
Sometimes in the middle of the day, there's as many shoppers working for pay as there are people shopping themselves.
It's strange ... Especially hard to see paying an additional markup on Whole Foods beyond the base markup ...
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Shame these people don't understand that their "employer" and they are in competition for profits. The whole point of disruption is to pay employees, contractors, and every other vendor less.
Who do you think is going to win, the giant corporations with billions, or the working stiff?
Who do you think is going to win, the giant corporations with billions, or the working stiff?
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“Gig economy” = “new way of avoiding taxes and minimum wage laws”. It amazes me that they’re always media darlings.
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Well, in fairness, the old school wasn't really different. Walmart, for example, wasn't ever known for its generosity.
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Anyone who wonders why unions became a thing, this is why. Sure, the mechanisms that the robber barons of the 19th century used were different, but the basic aim was the same. More money for me, crumbs for you.
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Shoppers are hitting 'Accept' anyway. It was a good gig while it lasted, now it's a ripoff, so move on. It's not like it's the funnest job in the world and they can't imagine doing anything else.
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But Walmart is a sitting duck to labor laws and taxes. Gig economy is a whole new level of squeezing employees and dodging regulation.
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Walmart used to be the best example of a company taking advantage of their workers. They did everything in their power to give their employees as little as possible. It's just sad that the reason they're not the worst anymore isn't because they've gotten that much better, but because there are others that are even worse.
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A lot of people like to talk about "well why don't they just get a different job?" except that it's not always that easy. Often times there are reasons people pivot to these jobs in the first place, and often times having gone in this direction doesn't help them any in trying to get back to a "traditional" job afterwards. Especially if they've been living paycheck to paycheck as it were. And with the models these companies use, workers can't afford to not hit accept if they're not ready to leave for good.
What's worse is when it's something that someone saw as a good job for how things went initially, now gone wrong. Comparing this to how people get stuck in abusive relationships is absolutely appropriate, as a lot of the dynamics involved are similar.
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It wasn't clear to me from the reading, but it looks like dumpling has pivoted into mygig. There isn't a separate dumpling that turned into an unnamed instacart competitor.
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I hate to throw the baby out with the bath water, but there are so many gig companies abusing workers, it is VERY clear new regulations about work are needed. Quite frankly, if a companies profit margin depends on abusing workers, maybe we don't need that business.
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Just tightening up current employment regulation to have rock solid, unquestionable coverage of these as employment would do it.
There are no rights to any given business model, and this is exactly the sort of thing government exists, in an idealized sense, to solve.
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Yeah, much clearer rules about employee/contractor would go a LONG way to solving the problem. Something like a company using "contractors" on a large scale would have to demonstrate that their payment results in a gross for the "contractor" that covers the contractors expenses plus a minimum wage.
In the past, one of the major keys to being a contractor was that you set your own prices. If a company like Instacart or Uber touch the contractors pricing at all, they should be on the hook for making sure it is a viable price.
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Yeah, fuck an easy life and a modern society with decent civil norms. Back in the day, if you wanted land, you just killed people for it, rallied others behind you, and kept at it until you were a King! None of that "buying" land shit or "paying" wages. Well, unless we do the serfdom model: then we can "pay" them some crumbs so the peasants won't rebel so easily. Stupid peasants.
Hell, and buying your own groceries? That's for pussies. Real men grow and hunt their own food, but you'd know that because you're not a cupcake, am I right?
And why pay for for healthcare for sick children? Long time ago, we only had the strong survive. You lose one, you just make another one. That's why there's so many pathetic snowflakes these days! Don't they know life is SUPPOSED to be as fucking difficult as possible?
/S
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This isn't equivalent to skilled labor contractor, it's equivalent to day laborer. You just don't have to get up and downtown for 5am to get picked for a job for the day.
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When the bread and circus' - I mean Facebook and Netflix - stop working.
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Workers have no leverage. The best thing workers can do if they don't like the gig being offered, is to not do the gig.
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This type of exploitation by Silicon Valley startups is out of control. There needs to be worker protections against this type of parasitic behavior.
Allow me to share my own experiences.
I work as a freelance photographer. To get enough work I must accept low paying gig-based contract jobs for Grub-hub, ApartmentGuide.com, RentPath, ezCater, Airbnb, HomeAway, Zillow, TripAdvisor, UberEATS, Expedia, etc, etc. They all are booked through slum-lord-esque booking agency startups (a big one being SmartShoot) that take a significant proportion of the pay. They bring in as many workers as possible and then let them fight over jobs (you must be the first to click the link when a new job notification email arrives). They routinely punish you by blocking you from getting jobs when you make a mistake or when you raise concerns about pay, workflow and technical issues.
You do the work, they get the copyright, they get the money, and they throw you just enough to keep you coming back.
Allow me to share my own experiences.
I work as a freelance photographer. To get enough work I must accept low paying gig-based contract jobs for Grub-hub, ApartmentGuide.com, RentPath, ezCater, Airbnb, HomeAway, Zillow, TripAdvisor, UberEATS, Expedia, etc, etc. They all are booked through slum-lord-esque booking agency startups (a big one being SmartShoot) that take a significant proportion of the pay. They bring in as many workers as possible and then let them fight over jobs (you must be the first to click the link when a new job notification email arrives). They routinely punish you by blocking you from getting jobs when you make a mistake or when you raise concerns about pay, workflow and technical issues.
You do the work, they get the copyright, they get the money, and they throw you just enough to keep you coming back.
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Bullshit. Any time a company employing unskilled labor changes the pay scale, it is for their benefit, not the employees'.
While I'm sympathetic, this is a case of, "It's just what I asked for, but not what I wanted!".
Ya think?
The problem with the gig economy is that it's greed all around with no controls. Unskilled labor expects to make a killing doing "side jobs", and the company expects to make a killing because they "don't have employees".
Meanwhile workers are chasing an illusion with none of the normal protections they'd get as an employee, and the company is exploiting them in ways we haven't seen in over a century.
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I don't know, as soon as you can? And it would still be late.
I'd like to point out that the maternity leave that's cited as a super cool perk in the passage you quoted, is 6 week shorter that the minimum mandatory* maternity leave in my country.
(*as in, it's illegal for an employed mother to go to work from 1 month before expected birth to 4 months after)
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It seems like insta-cart is one of those gigs that would benefit from division of labor. Where 3-7 shoppers working together could operate highly efficiently. One person could shop, and the rest could cover pre-defined areas for delivery. Or a pool of shoppers working together could cover a pool of stores and serve a pretty large pool of drivers and also guarantee the lowest price for every product by coordinating their efforts.
The drivers would never have to enter the store except to load up what the shoppers purchased for their order. They could constantly be going from the store out to customers.
Even two shoppers where one purchased the goods for another one's order, they divided up the goods, and then then the other shopper would reciprocate. There are lots of ways to save time.
Eventually the drivers would be replaced with autonomous vehicles and the shopper role would be handled by grocery stores.
The drivers would never have to enter the store except to load up what the shoppers purchased for their order. They could constantly be going from the store out to customers.
Even two shoppers where one purchased the goods for another one's order, they divided up the goods, and then then the other shopper would reciprocate. There are lots of ways to save time.
Eventually the drivers would be replaced with autonomous vehicles and the shopper role would be handled by grocery stores.
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Who could have guessed that services predicated on having tons of "unskilled" workers but not treating them like employees wouldn't trickle-down the wealth?
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Well, to be fair, that is the drive of EVERY economic actor, right? If the pot is fixed, then giving more to YOU means less for me, whomever "you" and "me" are. That was the whole POINT of unions right? If one is going to assert that the objective of senior management at a for-profit company is "Screw the workers, more money for me.", then one has to admit that the objective of unions is "Screw management and the shareholders. More money for us."
It's really no different. What seems to work is finding a middle ground that balances the interests of the parties and thus allows long-term stability of the enterprise. The gig economy is so new, we're just beginning to figure out how that synthesis might look.
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No one. Who told you that striving to be as much of an asshole as possible at every opportunity was a great way to live? There are better ways to be happy with yourself than trying (poorly) to bully others. If you need a referral I can point you at some helpful resources.
I actually believe that it's possible, at a societal, systematic level, for ethical actions and baseline support to create a better functioning and more prosperous society, while also fitting the core ethical frameworks of most popular religions (given how many enshrine the "golden rule") and simply being the right thing to strive for in treating others.
So it's always interesting to me how many people, particularly ones who consider themselves religious, act the way you are here when this type of topic comes up.
I believe that someone working is better than someone stuck on welfare.
I'm actually capable of thinking (unlike whatever assumptions you apparently trampolined), so I can read the welfare laws as written in the U.S. and arrive at the basic deduction that they're FUBAR and generally put people in a situation where they are stuck unless they can get a better than minimum wage job, and only if it's full time (particularly if they have medical problems, which is its own catch 22 then, because they may not be physically able to work a full day, particularly at the work more often available as unskilled labor). (And that doesn't even begin to unravel the complexity of real problems often involved in getting someone off welfare… you know, beyond the myth of magical self levitation via boot straps)
"Gig Economy", from the start, was only ever a "disruption" of competition via the advantage of using deceptive and unfair labor practices. This includes the competition of independent/freelance workers and small home businesses in these categories. One main reason it worked is because Silicon Valley is over enamored with itself and any trite idea someone can pitch with the right superficial framing, no matter how problematic the actual underlying issues. It's become a bit of a sad joke really.
Combine that with steady erosion of worker protections in general (primarily at the behest of the right, which is part of how this can slip so badly when groups assumed to be more liberal also start down this hole), and this is where we're at.
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I'm assuming his username means he was born in 1967, so you're probably talking to an entitled Boomer asshole who had it relatively easy in life, thinks he worked much harder than he did, and refuses to believe that those good-paying, unskilled jobs (which were plentiful in his day) are gone and never coming back . I say we yank these fossils' SS and Medicare benefits.
oh, and just so you understand what a wonderful person he is, he's someone who is happy he lives in a country where he can get teenage prostitutes and calls women "whores."
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Not that it doesn't suck for whoever is doing the shopping (and not getting paid enough), but there are legitimate cases for it. Just imagine anyone who doesn't have the transportation independence that you do.
For example, I was bedridden following a surgery recently, and my SO can't drive. We had our groceries delivered for that time-period.
Or, to be way more sarcastic: grocery stores? How lazy, paying people to grow and collect food for you.
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for the most part, religion is a thin veneer that shitty people cover themselves with in order to look like they're better than everyone else. Evangelicals are the worst. They're all "I'm saved, praise Jesus the Lord," and then vote for a man who is the literal embodiment of the Seven Cardinal Sins. how they justify that to themselves escapes me to this day.
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Somehow I don't think day labor is the standard we should be reaching for here. And besides, even at a relatively low-skill job like Instacart, you have a LOT more expenses than your average day laborer:
- A functional car
- commercial insurance
- Mileage charges
- FICA (both employee and employers share)
- Health insurance if you're putting together full-time work from gigs
- Workers comp (required of every contractor I've ever come across)
And I'm probably missing quite a few expenses. If you think $12/hour covers that, you're nuts.
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The thing where you're cut off from taking lucrative jobs for a day or a week, if you pass up four jobs you don't want, sure sounds more like employment than independent contracting to me.
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