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Instacart To Cut 1,900 Jobs (bloomberg.com) 39

Posted by msmash from the in-some-other-news dept.
Instacart plans to terminate about 1,900 employees' jobs, including the only unionized positions in the U.S., representing a fulsome embrace of the gig economy. From a report: The grocery delivery company already classifies most of its workers as independent contractors, whose ranks have ballooned to more than 500,000 during the coronavirus pandemic. But starting in 2015, the company hired a small subset of workers as employees, who under U.S. law are entitled to protections like minimum wage and can be subject to more direction and training by their boss. "What we found is that our shoppers require training and supervision, which is how you improve the quality of the picking," Instacart Chief Executive Officer Apoorva Mehta said at the time. "You can't do that when they are independent contractors."

Now, Instacart is moving in the other direction, eliminating 1,877 employees' positions, including those of 10 workers in Illinois who last year became the first in the country to vote to unionize at the company. The company said it's doing this as part of a shift toward new models, like providing its technology to retailers to have their own workers prepare customers' orders.
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Instacart To Cut 1,900 Jobs

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  • "...including the only unionized positions in the U.S., representing a fulsome embrace of the gig economy."

    I wonder if the article writer knows what the word "fulsome" means?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by starless ( 60879 )

      "...including the only unionized positions in the U.S., representing a fulsome embrace of the gig economy."

      I wonder if the article writer knows what the word "fulsome" means?

      https://www.merriam-webster.co... [merriam-webster.com]

      generous in amount, extent, or spirit

      a fulsome victory for the far left— Bruce Rothwell

    • Re:Fulsome? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Thursday January 21, 2021 @04:56PM (#60975404)

      It seems Apt to me. embracing the gig economy isn't a great thing.

      It really kicked off during the last financial crash, with some people calling it a new economy. While it was just a modern take on doing odd jobs to get money so you can live for the next week.

      Uber was initially advertised towards people as a way to help with your office commute. You have to drive to work 20 miles away to the big city, Uber can help find someone else who you can carpool to the city with. Where you will get paid if you drive, and pay less than a cab if you didn't. It wasn't meant as a job or an income, just some extra spending cash for an activity that you probably would do anyways.

      After the financial crash in 2008 a lot of out of work people, so they jumped onto these Gig Jobs, and worked to make it their own. As it was a way to get a job without trying to find a job.

      • It wasn't so much "without trying to find a job" (Score:5, Insightful)

        by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Thursday January 21, 2021 @05:09PM (#60975454)
        there were no jobs. The way it's been described to me is "Uber's a Payday loan where the interest is the maintenance on your car". We don't pay enough in unemployment to cover rent let alone food, so millions turned to the "gig" economy, which is a euphemism for skirting labor law that is gradually being enshrined in law.

        Long term it'll bite us all in the ass. What company is going to hire somebody for anything when they can pay them piece meal. You'd think we'd have learned this ages ago [duckduckgo.com] but, well, here we are.

        I give it 5-10 years before it's being applied outside driving & delivery. We'll start seeing piece work for IT before long.
        • What did you think would happen when goverments made it illegal to sell your labor below a particular rate? The real minimum wage is always zero, which is why people turned to the gig economy. It was the only thing that was willing to provide them with a way of earning a living. Artificially setting the minimum wage or requiring companies to provide benefits doesn't magically make all of those things spring into existence.

          Companies which can't pass the additional expenses on to their customers will go ou
      • It's mainly a way for companies to get away from the costs of traditional employees. There are always some jobs that will not be worth whatever the minimum wage has been set at just by themselves and other jobs for which the added costs of employee benefits make it unprofitable to employ labor for those tasks. Politicians keep trying to come up with new laws to try to make the economy behave like they think it ought to and companies develop new ways to get around those regulations because they want to stay
    • Sure - that's a prison where Johnny Cash sang.

  • "a fulsome embrace of the gig economy"

    fulsome foolsm
    adj. Disgusting or offensive.

    We see what you did there.

  • The current system is a mess of 100+ year old ideas, depression era regs, and tax code rules with unintended side effects.

    There needs to be a way to offer some sort of safety net around healthcare, retirement savings, unemployment for roles that aren't the standard 40 hour job. Doesn't mean that someone working 4 hours a week gets the same benefits as a full-timer, but something.

    I don't have all the answers but generally speaking I think benefits like healthcare and retirement should be separated from empl

    • Good luck with that. The massive companies that already exist in those spaces have no desire to be disrupted or for their business models to change, so they'll fight tooth and nail to keep the status quo in place. We also can't have a system that excludes any meddling from politicians, because then they'd have nothing to make campaign promises about.

      More generally I'd just say to implement a UBI that gives people enough to survive on, but politicians will just fuck it all up because they'll see promising

  • There is a problem with Unions in the United States. They do little to actually protect workers but create an environment that creates a bad working environment and possible job cuts.

    A while ago, I use to work as an outside consultant. I would often have customers of Union shops. These customers, often had the most worn out employees, as their jobs were always hanging in by a thread. I have been brought in because the IT Staff had been fired from the place, the Union did this because IT workers were more

    • No, there are plenty of unions that do protect their workers, some of them far to well. Try to fire a shitty teacher in New York (there's a documentary [imdb.com] about this) or a bad cop just about anywhere and see how far you get with that. Unions aren't different from just about any organization in that the goal is grow.

      Companies, charitable organizations, religions, bureaucracies, unions, or anything else ultimately function in that manner unless very specifically designed to prevent it, and like any unchecked

  • They're on the right track here .... (Score:3)

    by King_TJ ( 85913 ) on Thursday January 21, 2021 @05:04PM (#60975430) Journal

    Having done a bit of this kind of gig work for Postmates before? It's really not worth your time and effort for what you're paid when you have to handle the entire shopping process.

    It's one thing to incur your time and expense to drive to the location, pick up the order, and then drive it to the customer. But you burn a lot of time walking the aisles to locate everything on a customer's list. And typically, at least one thing they request is out of stock. So then you're stuck contacting the customer directly to explain the situation, assess and offer suitable alternatives, and make those changes as requested.

    If they just eliminated that whole mess and let store employees put the orders together for pickup, the job would make more economic sense to do.

  • more than anything else. It was a bit of a shock that it passed, and appears to have made it through on the strength of a half billion dollar ad campaign from Uber, but Instacart and other gig companies are beneficiaries too.
    • Considering how much of a margin it passed by (58% for, 42% against), I suspect it had a lot more to do with Californians who like their cheap taxi and delivery services and don't want to see the prices get jacked up. Everyone's always for "more rights" or "free stuff" until they start having to pay the costs themselves. Assembly Bill 5 was an especially egregious piece of feel good legislation with a lot of unintended consequences.

      • Considering how much of a margin it passed by (58% for, 42% against), I suspect it had a lot more to do with Californians who like their cheap taxi and delivery services and don't want to see the prices get jacked up.

        A lot of Californians who were "independent contractors" were afraid of losing their job^H^H^H gig work because Uber, Lyft, and others threatened to exit the California market [salon.com] if they didn't get their way.

        With the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and millions of people out of work, many turned to gig work for income, and many of these people also voted in favor of Prop. 22

        Meanwhile, the companies that backed Prop 22 are now raising fees to cover the benefits they said they'd give to their independent contractor

      • There was a ton of confusion about that proposition. Anecdotally, a large number of people who wrote comments online were wrong on which choice (yes/no) they should vote in order to enact their opinion on the matter. I don't think that was an accident.

  • What did they even do??? (Score:3)

    by SvnLyrBrto ( 62138 ) on Thursday January 21, 2021 @05:18PM (#60975472)

    I'd already have been shocked that they had 1900 employees *TOTAL*. If the layoffs are not drivers, how the hell does Instacart have that many employees *TO* lay off?

    I mean... it's not a bad app or anything. But it's not a particularly innovative one either. It's a combination of location services, a cart, shopping lists, billing, and dispatch. Those are all solved problems, most of which can be bought as a service or even as off-the-shelf code to be customized and used to your preferences. The biggest problem is operating at scale. But with a good DevOps/SRE team, putting together AWS infra that can handle millions of daily users is fairly straightforward these days.

    I'd wager that, with the right people, it could be developed, maintained, and operated with 190. What the hell do the rest of their people even do, that they had ten times that number just to lay off?!?!?

  • ", including those of 10 workers in Illinois who last year became the first in the country to vote to unionize at the company."

    Yes, bringing in goons to crack heads open is so 20th century. Now if they so much as think of unionizing, they are simply fired on the spot.

  • Gone jobs or moved jobs? (Score:3)

    by Diss Champ ( 934796 ) on Thursday January 21, 2021 @05:42PM (#60975554)

    It sounds like Instacart has simply reached the point where they have the bargaining power to get the stores to do some of the work they had to hire people for- meaning the stores need to hire people to do it.

    • Bingo.

      Dealing with humans (even if they are "only" contractors) is a major pain. Grocery stores already have a structure setup to deal with humans. Much better for Instacart to focus on the technology end, which both saves the stores from having to do it and gives the customer a uniform experience across stores.

  • Why does it require at thosuands of developers to write a shopping cart ?
    • It requires thousands of people to shop for groceries. For some strange reason, some of them were employees instead of contractors. Now they are all contractors.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by nrlz ( 6315852 )
        They needed salaried employees at the start to go to grocery stores and record the prices of goods for the day into the Instacart system. Then the contractors went and picked the groceries when orders were placed. Now that Instacart has enough scale, grocery stores want to join in the network, so the grocery store takes on the responsibility of entering the prices of goods into Instacart's system or else the contractors won't be directed to go there to buy goods. It's an ingenious system.

  • we need to end employer-provided healthcare now!

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