Hmmm....

[Dreamstalker]

It looks like our company has in fact contracted its delivery out to Insta drivers (a few other stores in the area have a metric called "Last Mile Delivery", and there have been some customer complaints about deliveries that indicate the drivers are not company employees). One of my AMs used to do Insta himself, and he pointed out that those shoppers are supposed to be paid by the platform. So any of us who "shop" those orders are, even though we are on the clock at the store, effectively working for Insta for free. Unless Insta has some kind of deal where they're paying the company per order...still no bueno if we're not getting any additional pay for doing that additional work.

This entire Insta thing was sprung on us all and it's becoming clear that it's not working out for anyone so there are a lot of questions; not the least of which we were never given a chance to read/accept the Insta T&C's but just expected to. I'd think that in a union shop, performing work for an explicitly non-union purpose cannot fall under "other duties as assigned". One person can't be both an employee and an independent contractor.

[csquared]

That will all depend on the contract with Insta. They may have contracted the delivery and not the shopping. I think that one of the chains around me did that.

[Dreamstalker]

The thing with this mess is that none of us facilitators were actually allowed to see that contract--why not, we're being expected to take on something else and we'd like to know what. It's also a concern if we know that perishable products are going to be in a third party's car with no climate control.

Insta shoppers--which we are considered when we're doing that--are supposed to be paid by the platform (so is the company getting paid per order? if so, that's gotta be a nice chunk of additional profit). There's also the issue of can the company enter into 'blind' contracts with nonunion entities on our behalf. If they had only contracted for the drivers (which btw is not going over well with customers at all) that would be one thing, but making us shop those orders on top of our existing workload and being expected to essentially ignore pickup customers in favor of accepting Insta orders if there's a conflict.