Instacart workers say they are planning a nationwide strike from Monday after the company failed to offer protections like hazard pay, sanitizer, and paid leave
Instacart shoppers are planning a nationwide mass revolt over the grocery delivery app's response to the coronavirus pandemic. Tweets: @jason_koebler and @rmc031 Tweets: Jason Koebler / @jason_koebler : SCOOP: Instacart shoppers are planning a massive, nationwide strike on Monday because of the company's terrible response to coronavirus https://www.vice.com/... Rachel Cohen / @rmc031 : Instacart shoppers are planning a nationwide strike on Monday until the company agrees to its safety demands https://www.vice.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the opening shot of a wave of pandemic-era gig labor action: Instacart shoppers, classified as contractors with no employer-provided protections, are organizing a nationwide stoppage over hazard pay, sanitizer, and paid leave while demand for grocery delivery surges. The company's response becomes the test case — weeks later workers are still frustrated over delayed safety kits the company promised on April 2, capping daily kit orders.
First-order effects
- Instacart faces delivery capacity risk at the exact moment it is scaling — the company went on to add 300K shoppers in eight weeks and post its first-ever monthly profit of $10M in April, so a strike threatens the workforce behind that growth.
- Shoppers gain leverage from the demand spike: their labor is essential to Instacart's pandemic order volumes, giving an unorganized contractor base unusual bargaining power.
Second-order effects
- The action spreads across platforms rather than staying isolated — by May 1, workers at Amazon, Whole Foods, FedEx, Target, and Walmart join in a coordinated strike demanding workplace safety conditions, turning a single-app grievance into a cross-company movement.
- Rival delivery platforms face the same exposure: any competitor that matches Instacart's minimal-protections model inherits the same strike risk as shoppers compare terms across apps.
Third-order effects
- The pattern holds into 2021, when up to 70% of Instacart couriers in the US and Canada threaten another walk-off over tips and pay structure — suggesting one-off safety demands hardening into recurring, organized pressure on gig-platform pay models.
- If contractor strikes keep recurring, the structural question shifts to whether gig platforms can sustain essential-service scale without reclassifying or voluntarily extending benefits to the workers who deliver it.
The trend: Pandemic-era essential work is converting gig-platform contractors from atomized task-takers into organized labor capable of repeated nationwide actions.