Reference no: EM132406381
Insta cart Doesn't What 'No' for an Answer
"Dozens of workers say the company's app hectors them to take on grocery deliveries that aren't worth their time, and that it doesn't stop there."
When Instacart Inc.'s eponymous grocery delivery app gets a new order, it typically alerts a nearby "full-service shopper," its term for the worker who gathers and delivers the groceries, by sending the order to the worker's phone with a bright green "ACCEPT" button and a repetitive pinging sound. But even if that shopper, who ostensibly has the flexibility to reject a gig, decides the latest one isn't worth the time and effort; the on-demand food delivery platform usually doesn't offer an option to decline.
Workers are forced to entirely mute their phone, close the app, or sit through about four minutes of that strange pinging, which many say sounds like a submarine's sonar and some compare to a time bomb. Those who wait it sometimes wind up having to do it all over again when the same job pops back up in their queue. To avoid that, people often have taken jobs they didn't want, says Eric Vallett, an Instacart worker in Buffalo who's tapped ACCEPT more than once to avoid another series of pings. "You just want to get away from that sound," he says.
The four-minute sonic barrage is among a slew of tactics Instacart uses to push workers to handle low-paying tasks they otherwise might reject, according to interviews with dozens of shoppers. They say the company has hounded them with phone calls, text messages, and threatening in-app messages, and that it quietly but explicitly punishes them for rejecting undesirable tasks by limiting their gig options and income. "We should have a right to say 'I don't want it' without being penalized," says Theresa Thornton, who shops for Instacart in Missouri City, Texas.
How much Instacart controls its shoppers isn't just a matter of morale or public relations-it's an existential question. Like Uber, Instacart's classification of workers as contractors means they don't enjoy the protections and benefits that employees get. The company's business model centers on keeping costs low enough to satisfy investors and keeping deliveries swift and reliable enough to win over customers, without exerting the kind of clear management authority that might lead a court to rule that the app's shoppers are employees and therefore covered by such laws as minimum wage.
An Instacart spokesperson, who declined to be quoted directly, says the four-minute wait ensures workers have time to make a decision about whether to accept the task, using the info Instacart provides on the number of items, retailer, distance, and estimated earnings involved.
Workers say Instacart isn't really providing the sort of flexibility it advertises. The company reserves many of its jobs for people who sign up ahead of time to be available during particular shifts. To get substantial work through Instacart's app, shoppers say, they need to earn "early access" to the shift signups by working 90 hours over the prior three weeks, or 25 hours over the prior three weekends. And that privileged status can be threatened if workers turn down jobs, or "batches," they deem undesirable. They say Instacart may prematurely end their shift or add a "reliability incident" to their profile, which hurts their chances of getting the better work. Instacart says most workers select hours without getting early access and that many appreciate that the reward system offers them a goal to pursue.
One in-app message that Instacart has sent workers warns them to "Watch it!" because their "reliability decreased" when they failed to "acknowledge a batch in time." Another tells workers who chose not to accept a batch that to continue shopping, they should confirm in the app that they're available. "Not doing so may affect your future ability to select hours for services," the message says. In Washington State, Instacart worker Ashley Knudson says she was punished with a reliability incident even after she told the company she was stopping work for the day because her car had been broken into and was full of glass. "It's certainly not flexible," she says. The app prompts workers to explain why they rejected an offer. The possible explanations it offers include the batch being too big or small and "other," but not insufficient pay.
Instacart says reliability incidents are meant to make sure the company offers work to shoppers who are available, not to punish them. Workers who believe they've been wrongly given an unreliability incident can contact support staff to get it removed, the company says, and it will do so in such cases as car trouble or illness. The reliability incidents go away over a 30-day period and don't lead to workers being permanently banned, according to Instacart.
In addition to the app notifications, workers say, waiting the requisite four minutes to dodge an offer they don't want also can trigger an automated text message to their phones that says, "Your batch has been removed." Every so often, Instacart's "Shopper Happiness" staff calls to push a worker to handle a certain batch. "They'll call you repeatedly. They'll be like, 'You're the only shopper available'," says Kristin Klatkiewicz, an Instacart worker in Covington, Wash. "Sometimes they're like, 'You need to take this order.' "
Instacart says a bug recently caused its app to send workers text messages when they didn't accept a task, rather than in-app notifications, and that it's fixed that bug. The company says that absent extenuating circumstances, its support staff shouldn't be contacting workers unprompted, and it doesn't force anyone to take on unwanted tasks.
This spring, Instacart released an "on-demand" feature that it said would make its app more accessible and flexible for workers by making some tasks available to whoever logs on in a certain region, not just to people who've signed up for those particular hours. But some workers who've tried it say the on-demand system pushes down their earnings and makes it tougher for them to figure out what's worth their time. The tasks are offered simultaneously to a bunch of workers in the same area and assigned to the first person who accepts them, so usually at least one is willing to gamble-often within seconds, with no time to read the offer carefully. "It's like Hunger Games," says Instacart worker Heidi Carrico in Portland, Ore. "If you don't accept it, someone else will." Ryan Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington, says such systems are "designed to be manipulative and coercive."
"Instacart seems to demand that workers behave like employees, but they have none of the benefits of employment," says Kathleen Ann Griesbach, a research fellow at Columbia University's Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics and author of a forthcoming study of app-based food delivery work.
Since last year, Instacart and its peers have been lobbying officials for relief from a new threat to their business model: a ruling by the Supreme Court of California dictating that workers can't be considered contractors under the state's wage law unless the work they're doing is outside of a company's usual course of business. Like DoorDash, Lyft, Postmates, and Uber Technologies, Instacart has been meeting with labor leaders and politicians to lobby for a legislative compromise that would let it avoid reclassifying its workers as employees. The company says it's working with lawmakers and other relevant parties to modernize laws and maintain flexibility and choices for workers.
"The way these platforms have been allowed to develop has allowed the creation of this fiction that algorithms are distinct from management systems," says David Well, former head of federal wage and hour enforcement under President Obama. "The system that Instacart has created bears little resemblance to one composed of independent contractors," he says, and "in almost every respect looks like employment." -Josh Eidelson
THE BOTTOM LINE. Instacart delivery workers say it's tough to get the preferable shift times they need, or to hear themselves think, if they reject jobs that aren't really worth the pay on offer.
Explain the main ethical issues in this case regarding whether Instacart treated its 'shoppers" fairly and identify the various stakeholders in the case and explain their legitimate expectations.