Instacart workers on strike?!
Take a minute to check out this guest blog post from Vanessa Bain, an Instacart worker who’s a leader with the Pay Up campaign. She & other Instacart workers are organizing a national protest with a simple demand for Instacart — to raise the default tip to 10% and remove the service fee. Once you’ve read about the protest they’re planning from Nov. 3 - 5, please sign up to sign up for a meeting for Instacart workers (or sign up for our upcoming meetings for DoorDash and Postmates workers) to talk about our next steps in organizing.
Hi — my name is Vanessa Bain, and I’m an Instacart shopper in Menlo Park, CA. I’m one of the shoppers organizing a national protest against Instacart to demand the restoration of tip defaults to at least 10%, and demand that Instacart eliminate its confusing service fee.
Instacart’s service fee has always functioned as a direct grab at our tips! When they first introduced the service fee, they began conditioning customers to tip less and less. Today, tips default to 5% at most — and often, they default to 0%. To restore what was originally promised to us, we demand that Instacart restore our tip defaults to at LEAST 10% across all customer interfaces, and that shoppers always receive 100% of the tip amount.
Instacart has repeatedly cut pay at every opportunity possible, and they refuse to pay us what we’re worth. We will continue to organize for meaningful increases in pay from Instacart, but in the meanwhile, we’ve created this specific demand to see immediate change. Restoring default tips will cost Instacart nothing, and they have no excuse not to comply with our demands.
To back up these demands, shoppers have organized a 3-day protest from November 3rd to 5th. We’re asking shoppers not to shop any batches during those dates.
Click here for more info on how to participate.
Please join us by refusing jobs from November 3rd to 5th, and then join the Pay Up campaign for an online meeting on November 5th to plan our next steps in organizing for better pay.