BY AUDREY WINN
Instacart is messing with
workers’ tips, again. The company’s workers are so fed up hundreds of them are
out on strike this week.
Instacart—a gig economy company for
same-day grocery delivery—has had problems with tipping date back to 2016. At
that time, Instacart removed tipping from the app, before being shamed
into reinstating a tipping policy the next month. Then, in
2018, the company altered its policy again by counting customer tips toward
workers’ guaranteed $10 base pay—leading to situations where customers were paying almost the full
base, with little contribution from Instacart. Now, Instacart is taking aim at
the default tip amount. When customers finish their Instacart orders, the app
had previously suggested a tip of 10%. This was unilaterally discontinued
and replaced by a 5% default.
In response to the default tip
change, Instacart worker and organizer Vanessa
Bain penned an impassioned Medium post last month which inspired a walkout of more than
a thousand workers demanding reinstatement of the 10% default. Instead of
improving conditions in the workplace, their collective action was met with
discouraging news. Two days after the walk-out, Instacart slashed workers’ “quality” bonus pay—one of the
only remaining pay incentives on the app, and an incentive that has been
alleged to make up to 40% of
the average Instacart workers’ already low income (some estimates put this
between 30 and 35%). The company also did not respond to the concerns workers
aired in the Medium post.
Starting December 16 and
extending to December 21, over 300 Instacart workers are expected to strike again to challenge Instacart’s incentive cut,
tip default changes, and declining work conditions generally, with events
scheduled each
day.
Amid mounting
outrage, Instacart has attempted to deflect criticism by vaguely citing
data. “During the last year, we offered a new version of the quality bonus and
found that it did not meaningfully improve quality,” the company told shoppers
over email in
November, after the first walkout. “As a result, we will no longer be offering
the quality bonus beginning next week.”
Through this statement, the
company blamed unverified, unexplained metrics for the cuts, not its own
exploitative model. The metric is presumably based on data, but workers and
consumers are never given insight into that data. While the jargon is new, the
underlying reality is not: A closer examination reveals this is just a
justification for good, old-fashioned exploitation.
By what metric does Instacart
measure whether an incentive can “meaningfully improve” quality? For an improvement
to be “meaningful,” what quantitative or qualitative factors must be present?
Is there a specific “quality” that is being measured, and how does it take into
account worker quality of life? Furthermore, how does the company justify
the gap between its lowest- and highest-paid employees? The average Instacart
executive compensation is $279,596 a year—with the most compensated executive
making $790,000. In contrast, the average Instacart worker is making between
$9.81 and $12.96 an hour.
By brushing off worker
complaints through references to unexplained data that is available to neither
workers nor consumers, Instacart is attempting to utilize an insidious
rhetorical tactic: “mathwashing.”
Coined by tech-entrepreneur Fred Benenson, the term “mathwashing” can
be used to describe attempts to use math terms like “algorithm” to gloss over a
more subjective reality. In the case of Instacart, algorithms are being used to
justify poor work conditions, since a faceless algorithm is more convenient to
blame than the greedy bosses behind the decisions. Benenson is clear in describing
why this is a problem.
“This habit goes way back to
the early days of computers when they were first entering businesses in the
1960s and 1970s,” he stated,
in an interview with Technical.ly Brooklyn. “Everyone hoped the
answers they supplied were more true than what humans could come up with, but
they eventually realized computers were only as good as their programmers.”
Though Benenson originally
used the term to describe how Facebook’s trending topics were not neutral, but
instead manipulated
by Facebook’s data engineers, it arguably applies to Instacart and a lot of
the "don't blame the bosses, blame the algorithm" language that is
common across the gig economy. While other companies like Uber and AirBnb have relied on this
rhetoric, however, Instacart is a particularly egregious abuser.
Talking with TechCrunch in
2016, CEO Apoorva Mehta relied on
jargon and abstract language to defend workers’ low wages. He praised his
workers’ “NPS score” and noted that wages were “not a zero-sum game” because
“the problem that we’re trying to solve is very hard.”
Instacart’s process for
deciding how to delegate orders is described by its website as a
“Stochastic Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows for Multiple
Trips.” In describing delivery scenarios, Instacart’s website discusses using
“time-based simulations” to replay "the history of customer and shopper
behaviors with the existing algorithm and the new one.” The section shows
colorful graphs and charts that fail to describe most of their variables,
including one that simply lists “metric” instead of even pretending to have a
quantity for measuring efficiency. The language is so loaded with jargon and
italics that it is likely inaccessible to the average consumer or worker.
While this jargon conveys
little, Instacart uses it to market the company’s “genius” design. To help
readers understand that they are dealing with a company that is much smarter
than themselves, Instacart includes a grocery-inspired illustration of
Albert Einstein to accompany explanations of its black-box
algorithim. Instead of leaving with a sense of awe, however, readers leave with
a sense of having participated in a game of smoke and mirrors. The explanation
reads less like a helpful primer and more like a desperate attempt to get
consumers to believe anything other than the truth. Namely, that the
company is the "despot" in control of its own algorithm.
This is not a marvel of
technological innovation. It is a marvel of exploitation. You don’t need an
advanced mathematics degree to know the score.
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