With the City Council poised on Wednesday to override Mayor Adams's vetoes of two bills to provide a minimum wage for grocery delivery workers — and with Instacart lobbying heavily to defeat the override vote — we are providing the following space to allow readers to hear directly from a delivery worker, who serves as the human heart of the debate.
I am an Instacart delivery worker. I have lived in New York for the past eight years and have been working in deliveries for the past three, including the last year for Instacart.
Many delivery workers like me rely on Instacart as our primary job. Yet, despite long hours, we earn less than minimum wage — barely enough to afford food for ourselves, when we spend all day delivering groceries for others. Between what we earn and the operating costs — driving a car, maintaining a bike, gas, insurance — many workers simply can’t make ends meet.
This is the reality for tens of thousands of grocery delivery workers. We are often offered a base pay of $7 to $8 per order for tasks that can take 40 minutes to an hour — from picking up and shopping to delivering — often without accounting for the obstacles we face navigating crowded streets or long store lines.
There’s been a lot of talk about what workers really want or need. The math is simple, we want and need dignified pay to put food on our tables. Under a minimum pay rate, I would make $11,000 more a year working 25 hours per week. Imagine what that means to me and my family to survive. We want and need our ally, the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, strengthened with laws that will support us as workers and help them carry on the fight against these billionaire app companies and their greed. We want and need to work and to be paid for all of that work.
I wish Instacart cared about its workers, but again and again the company proves the opposite is true. Instacart classifies us as independent contractors to get around giving us basic things like health insurance or workers compensation when we get hurt at work. It invests millions of dollars in fighting laws that would make our lives better, instead of just paying us a fair wage. And, the company lies when it says it wants to “protect flexibility" when really what Instacart means to say is they don’t want to pay us for all the time we work.
Well, it ends today. Our so-called “flexibility” should never come at the cost of our pay, our safety, or our families’ survival. We will never accept being undervalued and unsafe on the streets of this city. And, when Instacart comes to punish us with unfair deactivations, we will fight that, too. To them, we are just numbers in an algorithm that they can make go away with a switch, but I believe delivery workers are more than that.
That is why we are working with the Council to also pass Introduction 1332, which would prohibit app-based delivery services from unjustly deactivating delivery workers. This will not only ensure job security, but also guarantee compliance with dignified pay. Council heroes Sandy Nurse and Jen Gutierrez, have done an amazing thing for grocery workers. We will keep fighting alongside them and with them to make this city a better place for workers.
Delivery workers and their allies will rally at City Hall at 11 a.m. on Wednesday in advance of the override vote.
