Instacart’s gig workers are planning a nationwide strike • Hacker News Board

Re: Instacart’s gig workers are planning a nationwide strike

#111

Post by peterwwillis » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 6:45 AM UTC

Other delivery services don't have the problems of Instacart. My CSA delivers me a custom food order once a week. They leave a box at my door, stand across the street, call me, and wait until I come out and grab it. And their workers are getting paid fairly. And they don't screw over local businesses. And they get me what I actually ordered. I just have to wait a whooole week for this amazing convenience, and pay less than Instacart charges for delivery.

Gig working will continue to exploit businesses, workers, and consumers until we solve the problem that made it a viable business model: income inequality.

If people didn't need multiple part time jobs to survive, they wouldn't be working these terrible conditions. And when that stops, businesses (like restaurants) will also stop being abused by predatory gig-fueled companies (like grubhub). And if people didn't need to make extra cash with Uber, there'd be enough tax money to fund better public transit, which further levels the economic playing field.

Re: Instacart’s gig workers are planning a nationwide strike

#112

Post by triangleman » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 7:16 AM UTC

l_davis wrote: post #110

blackrock wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CDC recommendation to not wear a face mask in public is insane! This is a pulmonary infectious disease. Meaning that the virus is airborne. If you are infected, then every breath you exhale, every laugh or word you speak, every sneeze or cough you make, can transmit the virus into the air, inside the room that you are in. And it may take 3 hours before the virus particles settle on the ground. And you don’t know…

If the public used cotton masks, it would help and wouldn't take masks away from health care workers. If this were more normalized, the rate of spread could be lowered.

Hoping to see Czech Republic's actions bear fruit in the next few days: https://twitter.com/jeremyphoward/status/1242894406031757313

Re: Instacart’s gig workers are planning a nationwide strike

#113

Post by fzeroracer » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 7:24 AM UTC

imgabe wrote: post #71

wpietri wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm all for providing health care (not insurance) via taxes. I think the burden of (mandatory) sick time should fall on the company, because otherwise you create an enormous parallel bureaucracy and require a one-size-fits-all solution to a problem that requires a lot more nuance. As to other benefits, it depends, but a lot of those are probably best left in the hands of the company in that they're another form of co…

As far as I understand, in other countries that provide, say mandatory maternity/paternity leave, there is a benefit provided by the government that covers at least part of that (not sure about sick leave). Otherwise you kill small businesses. Google can easily afford to cover someone's pay if they are out sick or on parental leave or whatever. A five person shop might not be able to afford to continue paying 20% of…

> The harder you make it to start and run a small business, the fewer small businesses there are, which means everyone works for and is a customer of the same increasingly small pool of ever larger businesses. Which means that money and power continue to concentrate in the small group of people that run and own those businesses.

I don't necessarily agree with this. To attack this argument from another angle, there are many European countries out there that have a thriving small business economy while also placing a lot more societal burdens on them.

In America as we're seeing with the coronavirus, a lot of these small businesses are barely solvent. That's even in spite of us giving them almost no responsibility to their workers, so theoretically the barrier to entry for a small business should be as low as possible. Yet the coronavirus is causing some hefty damage to those smaller businesses because as it turns out, many of them were one crisis away from dying.

I don't think the issue has anything to do with the difficulties of starting a small business but rather the difficulties of having to compete with larger companies which have a lot of their costs negated by the economy of scale they operate at.

Re: Instacart’s gig workers are planning a nationwide strike

#114

Post by closeparen » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 7:31 AM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #26

tryptophan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great. Lets ban gig work and make sure that instead of a crappy income they have no income!

It always amazes me how the discussion can go so quickly go from "The mighty market solves all problems!" to, "The market is an incredibly fragile flower, and the slightest worker protections will result in mass unemployment and starvation!" Before Instacart, people went to the grocery store just fine. If Instacart has to pay workers a living wage, some people at the margins might return to shopping themselves, but I…

It can be exploitative and also better than the alternative at the same time. Those things are not in conflict.

I understand the moral satisfaction of punishing the evil profiteer. I don’t see how you can claim to be acting on behalf of the worker when you trade off her livelihood in exchange for that satisfaction.

Re: Instacart’s gig workers are planning a nationwide strike

#115

Post by SturgeonsLaw » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 7:35 AM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #103

koolba wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 10% margins are what’d be insane. Not an individual bill of $100. At 2-3% the profits on that bill drop down to nowhere near enough to cover gas, mileage, health insurance, unemployment tax, and everything else tacked on for the true cost of delivery.

> At 2-3% the profits on that bill drop down to nowhere near enough to cover gas, mileage, health insurance, unemployment tax, and everything else tacked on for the true cost of delivery. I don't understand how most of those things are "true costs" at all. This type of work is ideal for college students, who are typically still on their parents health insurance, or as supplementary work for someone who already has a…

Well yeah, you can make the numbers square up if you ignore/offload a bunch of costs, but not everyone who is delivering for one of these companies is a student or has another income stream, and wear-and-tear on a vehicle will manifest as a mechanical fault one day.

This argument sounds like a lot like the argument against raising minimum wage ("it's not meant to be enough to survive on"), however the reality is that large numbers of these gigs/jobs are worked by adults who depend on it as a primary source of income, and in the face of the massive and sudden job losses we're seeing, it's quite callous to say they should "just choose different jobs".

If the Instacarts and Ubers of the world cannot afford to pay these people appropriately then their business model is a failure.

Re: Instacart’s gig workers are planning a nationwide strike

#116

Post by CamperBob2 » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 7:43 AM UTC

drjesusphd wrote: post #75

markdown wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your implication being that the average American who is negatively affected by a public employee union strike takes the side of the government and blames workers for inconveniencing them?

It's far more petty than that. No one actually has to be inconvenienced. The average American is just plain resentful of unionized public employees.

Yes, it's one thing to gang up to extort General Motors, and another thing entirely to gang up to extort the taxpayer.

Public-sector unions should not be a thing.

Re: Instacart’s gig workers are planning a nationwide strike

#117

Post by faeyanpiraat » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 7:44 AM UTC

untog wrote: post #105

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would rather pay a higher delivery fee In New York, we have Caviar [1][2], a mid-tier to premium food-delivery company. They differentiated based on premium food. I haven't heard any complaints from their delivery staff, though this may be on account of their size. Is there a premium player in the grocery delivery business? Something like FreshDirect, but with better service? [1] https://www.trycaviar.com [2] htt…

> I haven't heard any complaints from their delivery staff, though this may be on account of their size. This is probably the key part. Does Caviar pay their drivers more than other sites? The cynic in me suggests that no, they don’t. Maybe, maybe, they get better tips as a result of delivering premium food.

In my experience as a food courier, tipping amount do not correlate with the category of food delivered. You could get tipped more for a hamburger than a sushi.

In fact the only correlation I've noticed is when the recipient seems like a decent person, combined with you having to go trough an extraordinary amount of trouble, like getting on a hill at the edge of the city, or having to navigate trough a confusing maze in a giant office complex.

But then again sometimes you deliver in the night trough a thunderstorm an orbital amount of stuff for a party, and get nothing.

Re: Instacart’s gig workers are planning a nationwide strike

#118

Post by andromeduck » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 8:38 AM UTC

wolco wrote: post #100

drjesusphd wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's far more petty than that. No one actually has to be inconvenienced. The average American is just plain resentful of unionized public employees.

Jealous because they get benefits private companies don't offer anyone below a certain level. This is accepted because top level pay is so mucher higher. Unionized employees realized it is better we get more now and take less if/when we make it to the top(which won't happen anyways).

Don't forget screwing the next generation! Unions love incumbancy.

Re: Instacart’s gig workers are planning a nationwide strike

#119

Post by monadic2 » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 8:57 AM UTC

taylorlapeyre wrote: post #90

cameronfraser wrote: post #40

Everlane workers tried to form a union and they were all fired https://twitter.com/EverlaneU/status/1243615472307695618 When there are a ton of people looking for work it is not really a good time to be striking

Speaking as a former employee with many friends on the front lines of this event, the lay-offs have very little to do with the team that (previously) wanted to unionize, and much more to do with COVID financial impact and the retail team, of which many many more are now out of a job (vs the team where some percentage of the members previously wanted to unionize). Whoever the person running that account is, they are n…

Why was the company (and many like it) so vulnerable? Many of my friends wear everlane.

Re: Instacart’s gig workers are planning a nationwide strike

#120

Post by foobar1962 » Sat, Mar 28, 2020, 9:46 AM UTC

bogomipz wrote: post #33

claudeganon wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a joke. I know people who have been to the ER with severe symptoms who were turned away without testing (mostly because they’re young and “expected” to recover). Every company that’s using testing as a precondition for benefits, when testing has been widely reported to be unavailable, is despicable.

Indeed this story is real eye opener: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52019509

I’m in Sydney Australia. Last Wednesday I woke with a sore throat and stuffy head. I drive a public bus and was concerned that I may have picked the virus up, and may be spreading it.

In the evening that night I went to the local hospital emergency. They had an area specifically for covid testing.

With 30 minutes I was tested, and told I needed to have 5 days off work. If the test was negative the government would pay for the sick time. If I was positive my company’s normal sick leave would need to cover it. I was negative and back at work, no cost to me.