Still, she said, she was concerned about losing her livelihood if she were to walk off the job. Ms. Brazier said that most of the Instacart personnel at her store turned up for work on Monday and that it appeared to be a fairly normal day.
Several current and former Instacart workers said it was notable that the walkout appeared to unite those who are classified by the company as independent contractors with so-called in-store shoppers, who are employees and only prepare orders within stores.
In the past, only contractors had taken part in similar actions. But once a Vice article about the walkout began circulating on Friday, said Ryan Hartson, who is an in-store Instacart employee in Chicago, he and other employees decided to join in. “It’s the nature of being front-line workers,” he said. “It feeds into ‘Oh, we need to take action, go forward and do that together.’”
Jake Rosenfeld, a sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis who studies labor, said that organizing typically accelerated in good economic times rather than recessions, with the glaring exception of the Great Depression, in which a sense of despair helped bring workers together.
But Mr. Rosenfeld said he was skeptical that workers could capitalize on the current anxiety and frustration absent favorable legislation that enables organizing, a more accommodating response from employers or more robust assistance from established institutions, like existing unions.
Mr. O’Toole, the Chicago union official, said there were hundreds of Instacart employees in the area that his union was trying to organize after helping to organize a small group in suburban Skokie. He said the call for the strike was “clearly resonating.”
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/business/economy/coronavirus-instacart-amazon.html
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