Instacart has 10 employees who voted to join the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1546 union, and the company laid all of them off.
It sounds like a terrible thing to do, and it also sounds incredibly illegal. Employees have the right to form unions, and the National Labor Relations Board tends to come down hard on companies that try to quash these rights. (And, under a Biden administration, you can expect those rights to be strongly enforced.)
But the important part of this layoff is below the headlines: “According to the UFCW, Instacart is firing nearly 2,000 of its 10,000 grocery store workers as part of these layoffs, and offering as little as $250 as severance.”
David Miklas, a Florida-based employment lawyer, explains:
To keep reading, click here: Why Instacart Will (Probably) Get Away With Laying Off Union Members
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Basically this is total spin. They have a valid business reason and there are mass layoffs and yes, all 10 of the unionized staff are affected, but it’s based on their location, not their union status.
Just a lucky coincidence? /s
It appears that InstaCart is using the right to work law against their “contractors” using a loophole of the wording, which is a typical lawyer move. We all know that right to work law bounces both ways as both sides (employer versus employee) can stop the commitment to continue working together for trivia reasons with no hassles. This sounds like another assumption of worker rights. As for the 10 workers who joined a union to help negotiate a contract, nothing was mentioned in the article about what job, the union was going to help with a contract.