Instacart focuses 1900 employees, including its only unionized workers

Instacart will fire its only unionized workers as part of a plan to lay off nearly 1,900 workers in supermarkets across the country.

The grocery delivery business employs several thousand shoppers who pack grocery orders in stores for pickup or delivery. It is not like the roughly 500,000 independent contractors who pick up items from various places and deliver them to customers.

Instacart revealed its intention this week to lay off some 1,877 of those in-store shoppers as part of a change in the way grocery retailers use its services. Affected employees work in stores that will begin using their own employees to fulfill pickup orders placed through Instacart, the company says.

Among them, 10 buyers of a Mariano grocery store in Skokie, Ill., Who became the only Instacart employees to join a union last year.

Instacart says the cuts had nothing to do with workers being unionized. But the move outraged the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, which represents Mariano’s staff, and pushed for more protection for grocery store workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Instacart laying off the only unionized workers in the company and destroying the jobs of nearly 2,000 dedicated frontline workers amid this public health crisis is simply bogus,” said Marc Perrone, the union’s international president, in a press release.

The Mariano’s store is one of many owned by supermarket giant Kroger where some 366 Instacart shoppers will be cut as early as mid-March, according to a letter on Tuesday that Instacart lawyers sent to the UFCW.

The San Francisco-based startup – which is reportedly preparing to go public this year – said the layoffs resulted from retailers’ decision to process orders with their own workers rather than Instacart’s.

But it’s also “much more costly on a cost-per-delivery basis” for Instacart to use in-store buyers in certain locations compared to its full-service providers, who can both process orders and deliver them instead. than picking up items from the site. shop workers, lawyer Joseph Santucci said in his letter to the union.

Instacart says it will either move the laid-off shoppers to other stores where it has open positions or try to help them get hired by the retailer that runs their current store. Those who are cut will receive severance packages ranging from $ 250 to $ 750 depending on experience, Santucci wrote.

“We know this is an incredibly difficult time for many as we navigate the COVID-19 crisis, and we are doing all we can to help in-store shoppers through this transition,” Instacart said in a statement. .