Instacart will lay off its only unions as part of a plan to place nearly 1,900 employees in supermarkets across the country.
The grocery delivery company employs several thousand shoppers who pack grocery orders at stores for pickup or delivery. This is different from the approximately 500,000 independent contractors who pick up items from different locations and deliver them to customers.
Instacart unveiled plans this week to lay off about 1,877 retailers as part of a shift in the way grocery stores use their services. The staff members involved work at stores that will use their own employees to execute pick-up orders placed by Instacart, the company says.
Among them are ten shoppers at a Mariano’s grocery store in Skokie, Illinois, who last year became the only Instacart employees to join a union.
Instacart says the cuts had nothing to do with the fact that the workers were united. But the move angered the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, which represents Mariano’s staff, and called for the protection of grocery workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Instacart’s dismissing the only union workers at the company and destroying the work of nearly 2,000 dedicated front-line workers in the midst of this public health crisis is simply wrong, ‘said Marc Perrone, the union’s international president, in a statement.
The Mariano’s store is one of several owned by supermarket giant Kroger, where about 366 Instacart buyers will be cut as soon as March, according to a letter from Instacart sent to the UFCW on Tuesday.
The San Francisco-based company, which is reportedly preparing to become known this year, said the layoffs were the result of retailers’ decisions to place orders with their own workers rather than Instacart’s.
But it is also ‘significantly more expensive on a cost-per-delivery basis’ for Instacart to use in-store shopping compared to its full service contractors, who can both execute and deliver orders rather than deliver items to store-based workers , the lawyer Joseph Santucci said in his letter to the union.
Instacart says it will transfer discarded shopping to other stores where it has positions, or to help them be hired by the retailer who runs their current store. Those who are pruned will receive severance pay ranging from $ 250 to $ 750, depending on experience, Santucci wrote.
“We know this is an incredibly challenging time for many as we move through the COVID-19 crisis, and we are doing everything in our power to support retailers in this store,” Instacart said in a statement.