Shipt shoppers are the latest gig workers to organize: How they are using social media to communicat

And Solis, the introvert, became a voice for thousands of gig workers, leading calls for better treatment and wages. He organized walkouts and protests over pay and safety concerns at Shipt, the grocery delivery app owned by Target. He also joined the Gig Workers Collective, a group pushing for better treatment of workers across apps, including Instacart and Lyft.

Shipt said workers' feedback is important to the company. "We encourage shoppers to speak freely to Shipt about their shopper experience through multiple feedback channels we offer. We also have teams dedicated to hearing, logging and sharing shopper feedback we receive among the company," spokeswoman Danielle Schumann told NPR in a statement.

Shipt shoppers are the latest gig workers to organize

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The company says the new pay model did not change shoppers' average pay. A study by MIT researchers reached the same conclusion, but found pay varies widely, with 41% of workers in its survey earning less under Shipt's new system.

The fund operates under the umbrella of Coworker.org, a nonprofit organization that helps workers organize and win improvements in their jobs and workplaces by providing support and leadership development to workers across a variety of industries. The Solidarity Fund has its own board of directors, though the two organizations currently share staff.

The company would not disclose the number of gig workers on its Spark platform, but its website indicates that it operates in more than 230 U.S. metro areas. Walmart's mass hiring of personal shoppers in its stores suggests the company also rapidly onboarded new gig workers. Spark's largest unofficial Facebook group, "Spark Delivery Drivers Nationwide," has more than 3,100 members.

Bain has turned from an Instacart evangelist into one of the most effective agitators against the company, in what has become a timely test of how much leverage blue-collar on-demand workers can amass to win better treatment from growth-obsessed technology companies that keep them at a distance. While continuing to work as a "shopper," picking items from store shelves and delivering them to consumers, she has helped build a grass-roots movement that has led to four national boycotts, including one last month. Bain is behind a Facebook group open only to Instacart shoppers who support collective action. The group has about 14,500 members, representing more than 10 percent of all Instacart's workers in the United States and Canada.

In February, Instacart instituted minimums of $7 to $10 for each batch of orders, which can cover up to three separate customers. Workers also get tips from customers, although Instacart says the company's contribution is bigger than the tip on most orders in which contractors do the shopping and delivery. The average hourly pay for Instacart workers was $15.54 before tips and expenses, based on self-reported data representing weekly wages from 80 Instacart shoppers viewed by The Washington Post. When factoring in the hours they wanted to work and couldn't find a profitable gig, it sank to an average of $7.15 per hour.

Grocery delivery has thin profit margins. But investors pumped billions into on-demand delivery start-ups because contracting workers eliminated the need to maintain a fleet of cars or invest in infrastructure, shifting the risk to gig contractors who make up a larger part of the workforce. Over the past year, Instacart tripled its number of shoppers to more than 130,000 workers. Lyft and Uber have a combined 6 million plus drivers globally.

The collective action led by Bain and other Instacart shoppers represents a new type of labor organizing within the gig economy, said Alex Rosenblat, author of "Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work" and research lead for the nonprofit Data & Society. Rosenblat noted for example that the group crowdsourced information from workers to show how Instacart was making changes to pay and demanded immediate changes to the app that could help improve their working conditions, such as upping the suggested tip amount.

In its early years, Instacart needed to recruit shoppers. It posted ads saying they could "earn up to $25 per hour" or $1,500 per week, according to a lawsuit claiming Instacart misclassified and misled workers, which the company settled for $4.6 million in 2017.

In September 2016, after Instacart sent what she described as an "earth-shattering" email that it would stop collecting tips - which at the time made up about half of her income - she felt compelled to take action, especially coming from a family of civil rights activists. (Bain's mother is black and indigenous, and her father is white. She describes herself as a "white-presenting woman of color.") She searched for other irate workers by typing the hashtag #boycottInstacart on Instagram and found two other shoppers also determined to fight back.

Instacart gig workers say that cutting gig workers around the country out of a day's income, which can be critical for keeping up with bills and basic expenses during the pandemic, is the latest in a series of unilateral decisions Instacart has made that contribute to increasingly precarious conditions.

Beyond wrong addresses and absent or unruly customers, Instacart shoppers (the company's term for its gig workers) encounter many other scenarios where they might have to cancel an order, including their own life circumstances: a flat tire, a broken car battery, a sick child. Instacart did not respond to a question about what options gig workers have when these scenarios arise.

You may have heard of the phrase the "gig economy," a term used to refer to jobs that are typically more short-term and paid based on the amount of work you do, as opposed to traditional jobs that pay a flat hourly rate. Uber and Lyft drivers, restaurant delivery workers, and Instacart or Shipt grocery shoppers primarily operate this way. In the online world, sites like Fiverr and Upwork make it easy for business owners to hire temporary help for specific tasks, or to sell freelance services to others on a per-project basis.

But a rush of hiring is likely to dilute any attempts by existing workers to organize walk-offs. Many people are applying for the new jobs as layoffs surge in restaurants, retail, hospitality, airports and other industries that have shut down. Nearly 3.3 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits last week, almost five times the previous record set in 1982. 2ff7e9595c