popular—that about three quarters of the contractors offered the option have applied. For those applicants hired, the company will now be making employee contributions to Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, and workers’ compensation.
In-store shoppers who want to continue as contractors are being offered the choice of new roles as delivery drivers or combined roles as shoppers and drivers.
“We continue to understand and appreciate the flexibility and other benefits that operating as an independent contractor offers to workers, so we continue to maintain roles in which those that choose to work as independent contractors can do that,” Saul says.
People who fill those delivery or shopper/delivery roles are not being offered staff jobs by Instacart. The federal lawsuit against the company maintains that they must, because those workers also qualify as employees under law.
Asked whether Instacart believes the delivery workers meet the legal definition of independent contractors, Saul said, “We’re not going to comment on ongoing litigation.”
Saul declined to disclose the hourly pay rate for the new part-time shoppers in stores, though she says it will be higher than the minimum wage set in the cities where Instacart operates. She declined to say whether the new employees’ paychecks will be higher or lower than those they earned as contractors for the same number of hours.
“The way contractors are paid is apples and oranges,” Saul says.
Arns maintains that the contract workers were not paid by the hour, but according to the number of orders they assembled.
The legal action against Instacart faces a threshhold hurdle in federal court. To litigate the claims of all the contractors as a group rather than through individual court actions by each worker, a judge must approve the pending lawsuit as a class action suit.
Arns says Instacart has moved instead to compel each of the contractors to settle their claims through individual arbitrations. A hearing on that motion is scheduled for Aug. 20, he says.
