On June 10 of last year, Instacart threatened to leave Seattle and said they’d be unable to operate if hazard pay for gig workers passed.
Instacart’s email to customers warning of impending doom on June 10, 2020.
They told customers that access to same-day grocery delivery would somehow be “at risk” if they were required to pay hazard pay to the people delivering groceries during a global pandemic.
They told Geekwire that hazard pay “could eliminate” their ability to do business in Seattle.
And they even took out a full-page ad in the Seattle Times whining about how having to pay workers a little more would make it “next to impossible” to continue operating — all while their CEO became a billionaire.
Instacart’s full-page ad fearmonging about hazard pay in the Seattle Times on June 13, 2020.
But one year later, Instacart is still here.
Despite their threats, we won hazard pay — and the company is now paying it to workers, and the city is successfully enforcing the law, with more than $500,000 in settlements to date.
It’s a tale old as time. Whenever there’s a proposal to move money from corporate bank accounts to workers’ pockets, companies strike up the same routine about how the end times are upon us and wouldn’t it be better if we all just forgot about raising pay and maybe we should just let them keep doing whatever they want forever instead.
That’s what big corporations said when we fought for and won a $15/hr minimum wage in Seattle and SeaTac. They said it again when we expanded overtime protections for hundreds of thousands of salaried workers in WA. And big gig companies like Instacart will probably be peddling the same nonsense again this year, as gig workers with the Pay Up campaign ramp up our fight to win a permanent pay standard in Seattle.
Instead of leaving town, business is booming and Instacart is expanding.
They're hiring more and more workers to meet growing demand for their services. And they just announced the launch of a new rapid 30-minute delivery service in a few of their biggest and most important markets — including Seattle.
So, as we push this year to win permanent policies that raise pay, protect flexibility, and provide transparency in the gig economy, we can't help but wonder….
Will they threaten that eliminating subminimum wages for grocery delivery workers will cause shopping cart wheels to spin sideways in that annoying way? Will they argue that flexibility protections will make kombucha taste even weirder? Will they claim that an unintended consequence of providing meaningful transparency will be a lower payout for their CEO when the company goes public? Or something else entirely?