Lay Off Staff and Restart Again
'Coming for Yous and Your Job': With Prop. 22, Are Grocery Staff Layoffs Just the Start?
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Vons.com employee Adam Jones unloads groceries for a delivery in Los Angeles. Delivery staff at Vons and several other grocery chains owned by Albertsons will soon be replaced by DoorDash workers. (David McNew/Getty Images)
When Derrick Neal moved back to the Los Angeles expanse from Florida last twelvemonth, subsequently his mother died, he needed to observe a job rapidly to keep paying his bills.
Neal, 40, has been working ever since he turned xviii, mostly in retail jobs at big chain stores like Walmart and Home Depot. In L.A. last May, he started delivering groceries for the supermarket chain Vons and was surprised how much he enjoyed it.
He likes arriving at piece of work in the morning and seeing all his routes for the solar day, he says. Vons provides him with a visitor phone and a van with compartments that he fills with various delivery items.
"Information technology'due south like I am bringing the whole store to the client," he said.
Neal says he has felt peculiarly skillful about doing his chore during the pandemic, delivering food to the elderly or ill who would otherwise accept to take chances their health by going to the grocery store.
The job has been a lifeline for him, as well.
"There weren't many people hiring at the start of the pandemic," Neal said. "Then I was happy to go the job."
Afterwards one of his shifts in December, Neal says he and other non-matrimony delivery employees were called to a coming together by their managers and informed they would all be laid off by the end of February. Independent contractors working through DoorDash were going to take over their jobs, they were told.
"It was devastating," Neal said. On superlative of that, he likewise had to move out of his apartment that month later his landlord sold the building. Unable to find another place he can beget, he has been living in his machine since then.
Neal says he doesn't understand the company's decision, particularly given how much delivery work has recently been bachelor.
"If I were able to talk to them, I would just ask them, 'Why?' " Neal said. "Who did the cost assay on this and deemed that it was more cost efficient to go with contained contractors than the people nosotros already take, that are there mean solar day in and day out, claret sweat and tears, going through information technology?"
Vons is one of many grocery chains endemic by Albertsons, the second-largest grocery company in the country. Earlier this month, Albertsons announced it would discontinue its in-house commitment services in parts of California and other states starting late February.
The visitor has not specified how many commitment employees will be replaced past DoorDash contractors, just the United Food and Commercial Workers union estimates it will be in the loftier hundreds.
"This decision will allow united states of america to compete in the growing habitation delivery market more than effectively," Albertsons spokeswoman Christine Wilcox said in a statement. She added, "Albertsons Companies Divisions plans to offer positions to each impacted associate."
Wilcox did not respond to a request for clarification on the nature of these jobs and the process by which they will be offered to delivery employees similar Neal. The company has as well not provided proof of whatever legal commitment to offering new jobs, or any guarantees of equivalent pay, benefits and job locations.
The replacement of employees by contractors is exactly what labor advocates warned would happen with Proposition 22, which California voters canonical in Nov.
"I'm not surprised that it happened this quickly, because what the Proposition 22 worker category that was created does is significantly lower labor costs for corporations," said Veena Dubal, a UC Hastings police force professor.
Proffer 22 creates a new sub-employee category that allows app-based delivery and transportation gig companies to legally deny workers access to employee benefits similar overtime, unemployment insurance and a guaranteed minimum wage. Instead, companies have to offer workers in this category certain watered-down employee benefits like health care subsidies and the selection to buy insurance.
The proffer was written past DoorDash, Uber, Lyft and other gig companies, which collectively spent over $200 million on the campaign, making information technology the almost expensive ballot measure in state history. Now that the measure out is law, it has nullified contempo efforts by all iii branches of California regime to force gig companies to allocate their workers every bit employees.
Dubal says logistics and delivery employees will just be the outset to lose their jobs.
"Suggestion 22 is substantially a design for how to lower labor standards across the board," she said. "For those who have been thinking of this as a whole different type of work, as something that would never affect them, this is really the time to start paying attention. This model of piece of work is coming for yous and your task."
Venture capitalists already see opportunity.
Shawn Carolan is a partner at Menlo Ventures. In a recent opinion piece titled "What Proffer 22 Now Makes Possible" published on The Information, he said there'southward potential for this new labor category to extend to fields like nursing, executive help, tutoring, programming, agricultural work and even zoo keeping.
Executives at most gig companies accept always described their businesses every bit "platforms" that connect contained workers to customers.
But that argument doesn't add together up for David Weil, dean of the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis Academy. Even though the work is through an app, he says, the business strategy is null new.
"It is just a function of the development of the erosion of workplace standards that has happened in lots of dissimilar means," he said.
Weil came up with the term "fissuring" to describe what is happening to American workplaces. Since the 1970s, executives have increasingly replaced total-time employee jobs with part-time, subcontracted and outsourced work. Weil says gig companies are but pushing that fissuring further by labeling their workers independent contractors.
"They're using the platform every bit a way to leave of the obligation of actually treating those workers equally employees," he said.
DoorDash declined an interview with KQED. But in a statement, a spokesperson said the company provided a vital service.
"DoorDash has always supported local economies, and as east-commerce and delivery have become even more important for many businesses during these challenging times, we remain committed to helping brick-and-mortar local merchants achieve consumers with the best of their neighborhood," DoorDash spokesman Taylor Bennett said in a press release.
The news of Albertsons' new arrangement with DoorDash has spurred other grocery delivery workers in California to unionize.
"I can't tell you how many times I've told people that I experience so lucky to have this chore," said Leigh Littlefield, a Bay Expanse delivery worker for Safeway, another grocery concatenation owned past Albertsons.
Littlefield is ane of 250 commitment workers for Safeway that just joined the United Food and Commercial Workers International matrimony. They beginning started organizing to receive guaranteed benefits, she says, after managers began blocking them from working the minimum number of hours required to authorize. The effort was well underway when they got wind of the DoorDash threat, which Littlefield says spurred workers to quickly finish unionizing.
Workers wrote into their contract that employees could not accept shifts replaced by DoorDash, Littlefield says. "If nosotros didn't have this contract," she says, "I imagine we would have been laid off with everyone else."
Derrick Neal was not office of a matrimony. He's living out of his motorcar, trying to effigy out what to practice side by side. He hopes he can find another job with some kind of safety cyberspace.
In America, that is becoming harder and harder to detect.
Source: https://www.kqed.org/news/11855985/coming-for-you-and-your-job-with-prop-22-are-grocery-staff-layoffs-just-the-beginning
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