Workers for the grocery delivery startup Instacart have reportedly still not received the safety supplies they were promised by the company during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.
Wired reports that workers for the Silicon Valley grocery delivery startup Instacart have yet to receive the safety supplies they were promised as they continue to work during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic. Instacart orders have surged to an all-time high in recent weeks as its workforce of 350,000 grocery “shoppers” pick up and deliver groceries to American households.
Due to the current pandemic, each of these trips put workers at an increased risk of contracting the Chinese virus, leading some grocery store employees have described their workplace as a “war zone.” Instacart workers staged a nationwide strike in March demanding sick leave, hazard pay, and disinfection supplies. Instacart ignored most of these demands but on April 2 it agreed to provide its shoppers with “health and safety kits” containing a reusable cloth face mask, a bottle of hand sanitizer, and a forehead thermometer.
Two weeks later, Instacart workers say the kits have not arrived. Wired spoke to over a dozen workers who have described a complicated process just to request a kit with little communication from Instacart about the status of their request. The kits must be ordered through Instacart’s online store carrotswag.com but many had issues ordering the kits appearing as “out of stock” or only appearing for “pre-order.”
One Instacart shopper, Marsi Rackstraw, stated that she repeated the process unsuccessfully for over a week until her order finally appeared to go through on Thursday. “I really want to believe they are looking out for us, but I can’t help but feel like the safety kits—if they do exist—are a PR thing or for optics,” Rackstraw said.
An Instacart spokesperson told Wired that the kits do exist and the company began shipping thousands of them this week. Instacart did note, however, that it had capped the number of orders that could be placed each day at an unspecified number of thousands. Once that day’s “inventory” has been ordered, the kit is listed out of stock.
Worker advocacy groups such as Gig Workers Collective say that Instacart’s efforts aren’t enough. “Even if Instacart manages to get its act together in regards to this promise of PPE, their response is still not enough to properly care for workers,” the group wrote in a blog post. “Some Instacart Shoppers, even under the best of conditions and with PPE, will still contract COVID-19. There is still no meaningful progress in protections for the Shoppers who will fall ill.” The GWC called the move a “pathetic attempt to buy good PR.”
Read the full report at Wired Magazine here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com