Instacart Grocery Shoppers, Amazon Delivery Drivers, 'Gig Economy' Workers Are New 1st Responders
'Gig Economy Workers Are Our Newest First Responders.' Instacart shoppers, Amazon delivery drivers, and others are making it possible for other people to engage in self-protective social distancing. Slate, March 12, 2020. Excerpts:
To take a trip to Whole Foods or any major grocery store right now, especially in more affluent areas, is to see dozens of usually young people with baskets and carts staring at their iPhone screens and then searching for black beans or frozen macaroni and cheese. A few wear masks and carry hand sanitizer. They may walk the same aisles more than once—a larger number of items than usual are sold-out at stores. These people aren’t buying for themselves, though: They are Instacart shoppers. Their job is to purchase these goods and drive them to strangers who have ordered this food virtually, perhaps out of overwork or laziness but increasingly out of legitimate physical fear of being in crowded social places and catching the virus. These low-paid, unsung workers—Instacart shoppers but also the Amazon delivery folks and everyone else who is doing gig work today that helps other people engage in self-protective social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic—are now the equivalent of first responders.
“First responder” might seem overblown at first. It is, after all, usually a term used for emergency personnel, such as firefighters rushing to the scene of a blaze or police officers at the site of a shooting. But it should also apply to those who are now fetching lettuce and medical supplies at a time when everyone else is staying in. These workers are putting themselves in harm’s way, even if they are not doing so in the more recognizably brave fashion of, say, an EMT at a disaster site. After disasters—Sept. 11, earthquakes, fires, riots—we ultimately move to award and protect those who have served as our social epidermis, protecting most citizens from the worst. We wouldn’t think of asking them to do what they do without health insurance and other forms of care.
The gig workers serving as our first responders and helping people survive this health emergency should be getting the benefits (and thanks) that we have provided to other first responders in prior crises. We now have a first responder fund for 9/11 survivors that has given out $6.3 billion. What might and should we create for the coronavirus front line, the gig workers? Take one Instacart shopper I know, named Vanessa Bain. She’s been laboring not just for Instacart but also DoorDash, Caviar, and Uber Eats in and around Silicon Valley. Lately, her days have been a constant struggle to serve clients who are stockpiling groceries in the face of the coronavirus while at the same time protecting herself...
Bain is part of a new private safety net that wealthier people (even moderately wealthier people) have created to protect themselves. Those with means are now potentially outsourcing their health risk-taking—and, at its most extreme, their mortality—to the Instacart shoppers and DoorDashers, the Uber drivers and the rest.
These workers are also often serving the people with disabilities and the elderly who are now even more at risk than they were just a month ago, performing the role that social service workers might have attended to in a more generous era. There’s a range of estimates for how large the gig labor pool in America actually is. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts it at just 10 percent of workers while the Federal Reserve says it’s a third of all American adults. Most are contractors and thus don’t have health insurance through their companies.
“The coronavirus illustrates the suffering of low-income workers: They don’t have sick leave yet will have to go to work,” Nobel Prize–winning Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz tells me. “They take public transportation because they have to—they are the most exposed and they will also eventually play a role in its spread. When they get sick, these are the people who may encounter surprise pricing at the hospital. That’s why we need to eliminate surprise medical billing and support gig workers and taxicab drivers."...
More, https://slate.com/technology/2020/03/gig-economy-instacart-doordash-amazon-coronavirus-first-responders-delivery.html
* Instacart Grocery Shopping Delivery Service, Website, https://www.instacart.com/
- Same-day delivery: We make deliveries in cities like Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, Chicago, Austin, Washington D.C, Houston, Atlanta and many more...
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