Instacart Shoppers Can Now Choose to Be Real Employees

 

Grocery delivery company Instacart—one of Silicon Valley’s fastest-growing upstarts in the emerging on-demand economy—is giving its army of personal shoppers the chance to become actual employees of the company.
Instacart says it is rolling out the option to become part-time employees to its shoppers in Boston and Chicago beginning today. Until now, Instacart’s shoppers all worked as independent contractors. Workers in more cities will get the same option in the coming months, the startup said.

Workers who choose to convert from contractor status to part-time will get workers’ compensation, and Instacart will pay for their unemployment, Social Security, and Medicare taxes, according to the company. But Instacart says employees will still have flexibility when it comes to picking their own shifts—a key selling point in attracting workers. The company also says it will not impose a minimum number of hours of work for its new part-time employees, though it will cap their number of hours worked per week to keep them below the full-time threshold. 

“When you look at the difficulty of shopping, picking and delivering items such as fruit or eggs that need to be carefully selected, you realize that grocery shopping can be complicated,” says Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta. “For this reason, we want to provide supervision and training, which can only be done with employees.”

Worker Unrest

Instacart’s announcement comes at a time when on-demand companies like Uber, Lyft, Postmates and others are surging in popularity and reach, creating a vast pool of cheap and flexible labor. According to the nonprofit Freelancers Union, 53 million Americans now work as freelance contractors—about one in three US workers. By 2020, according to estimates by software company Intuit, freelancers will make up as much as 40 percent of the US labor force—and on-demand workers are set to represent a significant chunk of those workers.
But some on-demand workers are finding the seeming freedom offered by their jobs comes at a cost. Some discover that they don’t end up enjoying the flexible hours or wages the’ve been led to expect. Others have discovered that having to manage their own equipment for the job, such as paying for gas and vehicle maintenance and factoring in depreciation costs, can be expensive. And if equipment gets damaged or contractors get hurt and can’t work, they lose the chance to make money.

Giving Workers a Choice

Most on-demand companies seem loath to convert their thousands of independent contractors to employees because of costs that could run to tens of thousands of dollars per worker. And those costs could mount quickly as well-funded startups seek a steady stream of workers to expand and scale quickly to meet investors’ expectations.

source: http://goo.gl/j8WrxF

Posted in: Shopping News