Freelancing, Self-Employment and Independent Contracting

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Teamsters Struggle to Unionize Amazon and FedEx Delivery Workers

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The Teamsters union has made little headway in organizing workers at Amazon and FedEx despite wage and other gains it secured at UPS last year.Last year, two unions representing workers at three large automakers and UPS negotiated new labor contracts that included big raises and other gains. Leaders of the unions — the United Automobile Workers and the Teamsters — hoped the wins would help them organize workers across their industry.The U.A.W. won one vote to unionize a Volkswagen factory in Tennessee last month and lost one this month at two Mercedes-Benz plants in Alabama. The Teamsters have made even less progress at UPS’s big nonunion rivals in the delivery business, Amazon and FedEx.Polling shows that public support for unions is the highest it has been in decades. But labor experts said structural forces would make it hard for labor groups to increase their membership, which is the lowest it has been as a percentage of the total work force in decades. Unions also face stiff opposition from many employers and conservative political leaders.The Teamsters provide an instructive case study. Many of the workers doing deliveries for Amazon and FedEx work for contractors, typically small and medium-size businesses that can be hard to organize. And delivery workers employed directly by FedEx in its Express business are governed by a labor law that requires unions to organize all similar workers at the company nationally at once — a tougher standard than the one that applies to organizing employees at automakers, UPS and other employers.Some labor experts also said the Teamsters had not made as forceful a push as the U.A.W. to organize nonunion workers after securing a new contract with UPS.“You didn’t have that energy that you saw with the U.A.W.’s leaders,” said Jake Rosenfeld, a sociologist who studies labor at Washington University in St. Louis.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Labor Board, Reversing Trump-Era Ruling, Widens Definition of Employee

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    The National Labor Relations Board, with a Democratic majority, restored a standard that counts more workers as employees rather than contractors.Labor regulators issued a ruling on Tuesday that makes it more likely for workers to be considered employees rather than contractors under federal law.Overturning a ruling issued when the board was under Republican control, the decision effectively increases the number of workers — like drivers, construction workers or janitors — who have a federally protected right to unionize or take other collective action, such as protesting unsafe working conditions.The ruling ensures that “workers who seek to organize or exercise their rights under the National Labor Relations Act are not improperly excluded from its protections,” said a statement by Lauren McFerran, the Democratic chairman of the labor board, which voted 3 to 1 along party lines to broaden the standard.Determining whether a worker is an employee or a contractor has long depended on several variables, including the potential employer’s control over the work and provision of tools and equipment.In 2019, when the board was controlled by appointees of President Donald J. Trump, it elevated one consideration — workers’ chances to make more money based on their business savvy, often described as “entrepreneurial opportunity” — above the others. It concluded that such opportunities should be a key tiebreaker when some factors pointed to contractor status and others indicated employment.In its decision in 2019, the board said that a ruling during the Obama administration had improperly subordinated the question of moneymaking opportunities.That 2019 ruling appeared to be a victory for gig companies like Uber and Lyft, whose supporters have argued that ride-share drivers should be considered contractors in part because of the opportunities they have for potential profit — say, by determining which neighborhoods to work in.The latest decision returned the board to the standard laid out in the Obama era, explicitly rejecting the elevation of entrepreneurial opportunity above other factors.The turnabout was criticized on Tuesday by businesses that rely heavily on contractors. In a statement, Evan Armstrong, chair of the Coalition for Workforce Innovation, which represents companies like Uber and Lyft as well as industry trade groups, said that the ruling “decreases clarity and threatens the flexible independent model that benefits workers, consumers, entrepreneurs, businesses and the overall economy.”Some labor experts, however, say it is not clear that gig companies like Uber and Lyft, which set the prices that passengers pay, provide drivers with enough bona fide entrepreneurial opportunity to qualify them as contractors even under the old standard.In his dissent, Marvin E. Kaplan, the board’s lone Republican member, made a version of this argument, concluding that the workers in the case before the board — wig, hair and makeup stylists who work with the Atlanta Opera — “have little opportunity for economic gain or, conversely, risk of loss.”As a result, he agreed with the board’s majority that the stylists should be considered employees who have the right to unionize.But Mr. Kaplan wrote that the lack of entrepreneurial opportunities meant that the stylists should have been considered employees even under the Trump-era standard, and that there was no need to alter it. More

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    Biden Proposal Could Lead to Employee Status for Gig Workers

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    A proposed rule, long awaited by labor activists, would make it harder for companies to classify workers as independent contractors.The Labor Department on Tuesday unveiled a proposal that would make it more likely for millions of janitors, home-care and construction workers and gig drivers to be classified as employees rather than independent contractors.Companies are required to provide certain benefits and protections to employees but not to contractors, such as paying a minimum wage, overtime, a portion of a worker’s Social Security taxes and contributions to unemployment insurance.The proposed rule is essentially a test that the Labor Department will apply to determine whether workers are contractors or employees for companies. The test considers factors such as how much control workers have over how they do their jobs and how much opportunity they have to increase their earnings by doing things like offering new services. Workers who have little of either are often considered employees.The new version of the test lowers the bar for that employee classification from the current test, which the Trump administration’s Labor Department created.The proposal would apply only to laws that the department enforced, such as the federal minimum wage. States and other federal agencies, like the Internal Revenue Service, set their own criteria for employment status. But many employers and regulators in other jurisdictions are likely to consider the department’s interpretation when making decisions about worker classification, and many judges are likely to use it as a guide.As a result, the proposal is a potential blow to gig companies and other service providers that argue their workers are contractors, though it would not immediately affect the status of those workers.Uber and Lyft have said in federal filings that having to treat drivers as employees could force them to alter their business models, and some gig economy officials have estimated that their labor costs would rise 20 to 30 percent. The companies have repeatedly fought similar efforts by regulators and legislatures in states across the country.Share prices for both companies dropped more than 10 percent Tuesday.In a statement, Uber sounded optimistic that the proposal would not endanger the gig-economy model, at least if the administration heeded additional input.“Today’s proposed rule takes a measured approach, essentially returning us to the Obama era, during which our industry grew exponentially,” said CR Wooters, the company’s head of federal affairs. “In a time of deep economic uncertainty, it’s crucial that the Biden administration continues to hear from the more than 50 million people who have found an earning opportunity with companies like ours.”Read More About the Gig EconomyWaiting for Action: The Biden administration’s plans to strengthen labor protections have been slowed by Congress, the courts and a lobbying blitz. The delay has frustrated gig workers.A Thriving Sector: Conventional employment opportunities abound, but gig work continues to be a popular choice for people seeking flexibility and additional income.Para App: A former Uber employee created an app to help gig workers maximize their earnings. But the platforms that hire them are fighting back.Covid Risks: New York City’s gig workers risked their lives during the pandemic. A survey illustrates the hazards they faced.Lyft likewise noted that the proposal would restore the approach under President Barack Obama, when drivers were generally classified as contractors, and emphasized that it would not force the company to alter its business model. The company said the proposal was merely the beginning of a longer process.Companies, unions, workers and other members of the public will have a month and a half to formally comment on the proposal before the department incorporates feedback into a final rule. After that, the department will have considerable discretion over whether or not to enforce the rule at particular companies.“While independent contractors have an important role in our economy, we have seen in many cases that employers misclassify their employees as independent contractors,” Labor Secretary Martin J. Walsh said in a statement. “Misclassification deprives workers of their federal labor protections, including their right to be paid their full, legally earned wages.”David Weil, who oversaw the Obama Labor Department’s approach to classifying workers, cautioned that just because the department didn’t bring an enforcement action against Uber and Lyft didn’t mean it couldn’t have. He noted that the Obama rule had been adopted late in that administration.“I think it is true that there are lots of gray areas in the platform world, but with the caveats that you always have to go deep into the facts, Uber and Lyft do not strike me as that difficult,” Mr. Weil said in an interview, adding: “There is a lot about the relationship that looks like one of employees.”The proposal helps defuse growing pressure from activists supporting gig workers, who complained that the administration had been too slow to intervene to protect ride-hail drivers and other app-based workers.Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, a former leader on workers’ issues in the California Assembly who is now head of the state’s labor federation, said in an interview that the action demonstrated the Biden administration’s strong pro-worker stance but that the effect of the new rule would come down to how aggressively the administration enforced it.“Companies just continue to break labor law,” Ms. Gonzalez Fletcher said. “They break it at the local level, the state level and federally, and there are no consequences. Everything is about enforcement.”The Biden Labor Department delayed and then scrapped the Trump rule on worker classification before a federal judge reinstated it. The new proposal would formally rescind and replace the Trump rule when made final in the coming months.Opponents could ask a federal judge to block the new rule temporarily or strike it down, but administration officials expressed confidence that it would withstand judicial scrutiny. They said they were merely returning to a standard that federal courts had repeatedly upheld over the decades.Uber and other gig companies say changes to how some of their workers are classified could force them to change their business models.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesUnder President Donald J. Trump, the department argued that two factors should predominate in determinations of whether a worker is an employee or a contractor, even if other factors are relevant: the degree of control a company has over the worker, and the extent to which a worker can increase his or her income by taking entrepreneurial initiative, like marketing his or her services.The Trump Labor Department suggested that gig workers like Uber drivers would probably be considered contractors under these criteria. Proponents argued that the Trump approach was necessary so enforcement didn’t snuff out new ways of doing business, such as the gig economy.But in an interview, Seema Nanda, the Biden Labor Department’s top lawyer, said the Trump rule “threatens to actually increase rather than decrease misclassification.”The proposal by the Biden Labor Department argues that several factors must be weighed when assessing whether a worker is a contractor or an employee, and that none of them are necessarily more important than the others. Among the additional factors are whether the work being performed is central to a company’s business, and what kind of investments workers make to do their jobs, such as buying equipment.Administration officials cautioned that determining whether or not gig workers like Uber drivers are employees would hinge on applying the test laid out in the proposal to individual cases and that they were not prejudging the outcome of any one of them. They also emphasized that the proposal did not target a particular industry.“We make a determination based on the specific facts in any case that we look at,” Ms. Nanda said. “Misclassification harms workers across a wide range of industries.”Gig companies like Uber and Lyft have sought for years to influence laws and regulations on worker classification. After the California Legislature passed a bill proposed by Ms. Gonzalez Fletcher that effectively classified gig drivers as employees in 2019, gig companies spent roughly $200 million helping to pass a ballot measure that would exempt their workers from employee status while granting them limited benefits.A state judge later ruled that the measure was unconstitutional. The decision is being appealed.Gig companies have tried and failed to enact similar measures in other liberal states, like New York and Massachusetts, but did help pass a contractor measure in Washington State.Uber and Lyft have often argued that drivers prefer the flexibility that independent contractor status affords them, such as the ability to work when, where and however long they choose to. They have cited polling data that appears to affirm this.Legal scholars point out that there is nothing inherent about employment status that would forbid companies to grant workers similar flexibility.Mr. Walsh, the labor secretary, has sometimes appeared open to the idea that gig workers could be classified as independent contractors.But when asked in an interview this summer whether he thought drivers would prefer to be independent contractors or employees if the trade-offs were made clear, he argued that “95 percent of people would say yes” to being classified as employees. More

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    If the Job Market Is So Good, Why Is Gig Work Thriving?

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    Conventional employment opportunities abound, but online platforms still have appeal — for flexibility or additional income.American workers are experiencing, by many measures, one of the best job markets ever. The unemployment rate has matched a 53-year low. Job listings per available worker are at historic highs. Wages, while not quite keeping up with inflation, are rising at their fastest pace in decades.So why would people keep doing gig work, a notoriously difficult and insecure way to make a living?Online platforms like Uber and Lyft say the number of people providing services on their networks is rebounding steadily after a sharp decline early in the pandemic, while businesses like hotels and restaurants are breaking work into hour-by-hour increments available on demand.Picking up shifts offers something that traditional permanent employment still generally doesn’t: the ability to work when and as much as you want, demand permitting, which is often essential to balance life obligations like school or child care.And lately, inflation has provided an extra incentive. As the cost of rent and food soars, gig work can supplement primary jobs that don’t provide enough to live on or are otherwise unsatisfying.Lexi Gervis, an executive at a financial management app called Steady, said that users’ data showed that more people were involved in gig work — and that the average gig income per worker grew — from the start of the pandemic through this summer.“We were seeing this move towards multiple income streams, because that work was picked up as a stopgap and then continued,” Dr. Gervis said.Take Denae Bettis, a 23-year-old Steady user living in Severn, Md. After dropping out of college, she got a job at UPS, and after a few years rose to become a safety supervisor, usually starting at 4 a.m. During the pandemic, she took on more responsibilities.“The job got really stressful, and I felt like I had no way out,” Ms. Bettis said. So in June 2020, she started a side gig through Instacart, shopping for people holed up at home. The next month, she quit her job, making it easier for her to pursue her passion: working as a personal makeup artist, which often requires taking early-morning appointments.Surviving on income from gigs — which for Ms. Bettis now include DoorDash as well as Instacart — isn’t easy. But Ms. Bettis thinks she can save enough money to open her own storefront.“We just went through a period where millions died, so are you going to spend your time at your job if it doesn’t fulfill you?” Ms. Bettis said, summing up gig work’s appeal. “Everybody loves stability, but if the flexibility isn’t there, I don’t think a lot of people are going to go back.”The State of Jobs in the United StatesEmployment gains in July, which far surpassed expectations, show that the labor market is not slowing despite efforts by the Federal Reserve to cool the economy.July Jobs Report: U.S. employers added 528,000 jobs in the seventh month of the year. The unemployment rate was 3.5 percent, down from 3.6 percent in June.Care Worker Shortages: A lack of child care and elder care options is forcing some women to limit their hours or has sidelined them altogether, hurting their career prospects.Downsides of a Hot Market: Students are forgoing degrees in favor of the attractive positions offered by employers desperate to hire. That could come back to haunt them.Slowing Down: Economists and policymakers are beginning to argue that what the economy needs right now is less hiring and less wage growth. Here’s why.Labor advocates have long been concerned about businesses that depend on independent contractors, since those workers aren’t entitled to the rights and benefits that come with employee status, like employer contributions to payroll taxes and unemployment insurance. But while the model has gained traction, it has been difficult to pin down how fast the ranks of gig workers are growing.The most accurate measure is Internal Revenue Service data on 1099 tax forms — the freelancers’ counterpart to the W-2 forms filed for employees — but that is available only to select researchers and released with a lag of several years. At last count, in 2018, a team of economists found that about 1.2 percent of workers with any earnings had at least some income from online platform work. (A Pew survey from 2021 found that the share of all adults with gig income in a 12-month period was about 9 percent.)The closest government metric that is more timely comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which asks people whether they count themselves as self-employed. That number rose significantly as a share of the labor force from early 2020 to early this year. But it generally captures people for whom self-employment is the main source of income — which, for most gig workers, it isn’t. More likely, the bump represents an increase in the number of people working as home improvement contractors and owner-operator truck drivers — two longtime means of self-employment that surged during the pandemic — and some white-collar freelancers.Less comprehensive but more specific data comes from third-party platforms like Steady, which allows nearly six million workers to track their often-variable sources of income and posts incentives from gig platforms to try working for them. From February 2020 to June 2022, Steady recorded a 31 percent increase in the share of workers on the app with 1099 income. More of those were women than men, with particular growth among single mothers. Freelance income per gig worker increased 13 percent.Ms. Bettis hopes that doing deliveries will allow her to save enough money to open her own storefront.Rosem Morton for The New York TimesAt the same time, the lines between gig work and traditional employment are blurring.Staffing agencies have long supplied temporary workers for industries like warehousing and light manufacturing, where they would have to show up at a certain time on certain days until the business no longer needed the extra labor. Now, some agencies also offer one-off, no-commitment shifts in workplaces that rarely used temp labor before, like restaurants, hotels and retailers.Under this approach, while offering the flexibility of gig work, the staffing agencies usually serve as the employer and administer benefits. Workers are paid as W-2 employees, not independent contractors, which means that they’re still protected by federal labor laws and elements of the social safety net, including workers’ compensation in the event of an injury.Snagajob, an hourly work platform, says that those shifts tripled from 2020 to 2021, and that they will probably quintuple in 2022 — mostly as side income because people’s regular jobs weren’t sufficient.“I think if they were getting the ultimate flexibility and all the compensation they wanted from their full-time employer, there’s probably less of a need for shifts,” said Snagajob’s chief executive, Mathieu Stevenson. “But the reality is, at the overwhelming majority of businesses, you can’t offer as much flexibility. So this is a way to say, ‘If you do want to add an extra $150 because you need it, whether because you want to do something special with your family or you need to pay the light bill, this is an avenue.’”More so than online gig jobs, it can also be a springboard to other opportunities.It worked for Silvia Valladares, 24, who started picking up Snagajob shifts a few years ago to support herself as a college student studying fine arts in Richmond, Va., the company’s initial market. Dishwashing and catering at different places allowed her to fit work in between her classes. But while working at an event venue called Dover Hall, she took a shine to hospitality, and decided to make that her career.“I got to know the regular staff and the management, and they got to know me,” Ms. Valladares said. “Eventually I asked if I could just work here, and they just put me on the regular staff.” Now, as bed-and-breakfast director, she’s the one posting gigs on Snagajob — which lately have been filling quickly.Worker advocates say allowing many competing employers to post last-minute shifts through an intermediary is probably a better model than a world of platforms that change rates at will and lack many of the legal obligations that employers must meet. But they say it still leaves workers on the margins of the labor market. Research on labor outsourcing has generally shown that temp workers are compensated less generously than co-workers who are hired directly.“You can look at it and say, ‘This is great, people need jobs, these companies can do the matching, it’s a win-win,’” said Daniel Schneider, a professor of public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government who has studied low-wage work. “The broader context is that it’s really not. It’s just a way for companies to shift costs and avoid economic responsibility.”And while gig work has retained and even enhanced its appeal through the pandemic and recovery, it is not clear what will happen if the economy tips into recession and the number of conventional jobs starts to shrink.Gig companies say it will bolster their labor supply, as the hardship caused by rising prices has. Uber said on its second-quarter earnings call that for 70 percent of its new drivers, the cost of living influenced their decision to join. “There’s no question that this operating environment is stronger for us,” said Dara Khosrowshahi, the chief executive.But in an economic downturn, an increase in worker availability for online platforms could coincide with a fall in demand. If customers reduce delivery orders and take fewer cab rides, it would be harder for those who depend on the apps to make a living.That worries Willy Solis, a driver for the Target-owned delivery service Shipt in the Dallas area who has been an organizer for better conditions.“When people are desperate for work, that’s usually what they want to do, is find something that’s easily obtainable,” he said. But what is good for the gig-work companies may not be good for the workers, he added. “Whenever they do hiring sprees,” he said, “we see an influx in gig work and a decrease in the amount of work that’s available to us.” More

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    Truckers’ Protests Over Labor Law Block Access to Oakland’s Port

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    For days, a convoy of truckers has blocked the roads that serve the Port of Oakland, crippling a major West Coast cargo hub already hampered by global supply chain disruptions.The protest is meant to send a message to Gov. Gavin Newsom: Keep the drivers clear of a California labor law that they say threatens their livelihood.The truckers, primarily independent owners and operators, are demonstrating in opposition to Assembly Bill 5, a law passed in 2019 that requires gig workers in several industries to be classified as employees with benefits, including minimum wage and overtime pay.Along with a coalition of trade groups, the truckers want Mr. Newsom to issue an executive order putting off the application of the 2019 law to their work and to bring labor and industry to the table to negotiate a path forward.A representative of Mr. Newsom said the state would “continue to partner with truckers and the ports to ensure the continued movement of goods to California’s residents and businesses, which is critical to all of us.”Smaller protests were organized last week at the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.In a statement, Danny Wan, executive director of the Port of Oakland, said he understood the displays of frustration. But he warned against more delays surrounding the ports, a vital link in a supply chain already hemorrhaging from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Covid-19 lockdowns in China.“Prolonged stoppage of port operations in California for any reason will damage all the businesses operating at the ports and cause California ports to further suffer market share losses to competing ports,” he said.When Mr. Newsom signed the measure into law, it received immediate rebukes from companies like Uber and Lyft, whose leaders argued that the law would change their businesses so severely that it might well destroy them.The state law codified a California Supreme Court ruling from 2018 that said, among other things, that people must be classified as employees if their work was a regular part of a company’s business.Both Uber and Lyft, along with DoorDash, quickly lobbied for a ballot measure that would allow gig economy companies to continue treating their drivers as independent contractors.California voters passed the measure, Proposition 22, in 2020, but last year a California Superior Court judge ruled that it was unconstitutional. Uber and Lyft quickly appealed and have been exempt from complying with Assembly Bill 5 while the court proceedings play out.But that wasn’t the case for the truckers. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge by California truckers, who under the new law are viewed as employees of the trucking companies they do business with.Nearly 70,000 California truck drivers work as independent owners and operators, ferrying goods from ports to distribution warehouses. Trucking companies and the protesting drivers argue — as Uber and Lyft did — that if Assembly Bill 5 is applied to them, the drivers will have less flexibility in when and how they work.Proponents of the law say the companies could simply take the drivers on as full- or part-time employees and continue to offer them flexible schedules.A majority of port truckers in California are independent operators and do not work for a single company. A smaller number of drivers are unionized and are represented primarily by the Teamsters.Matt Schrap, chief executive of the Harbor Trucking Association, a trade group for transportation companies serving West Coast ports, said the “frustration is that there is no pathway for folks to have independence.”“That frustration is boiling over into action,” Mr. Schrap said.Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, a former state lawmaker who was an architect of the labor bill, rejected the idea that applying the law to the trucking industry would be a disservice to drivers.“These truck companies have a business model that is misclassifying workers,” said Ms. Gonzalez Fletcher, who is about to take over as head of the California Labor Federation. “How they have been operating has been illegal.”The trucker protests come as the International Longshore and Warehouse Union is engaged in contract negotiations with the Pacific Maritime Association, representing the shipping terminals at 29 ports from San Diego to Seattle.Farless Dailey III, president of Local 10 of the longshore union, said that for their own safety, his members were not trying to get through the truck blockade.“They don’t get paid when they don’t get in,” he said. “But we’re not going to put our members in harm’s way to pass through the line of truckers.”Officials at the port said the largest marine terminal had been closed since Monday because of the protests. Three other smaller terminals have operated, but with a limited capacity.Christopher S. Tang, a distinguished professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, Anderson School of Management, who studies supply chains, said the shutdowns at the Port of Oakland should not — for now — cause major issues for consumers.“The impact will not be significant in the short term,” he said. “Many retailers have stockpiled inventory.”On Thursday, German Ochoa, a trucker who lives in Oakland, arrived at the port, as he had every day this week.As horns from semitrucks blared in the background, Mr. Ochoa said by phone that he was standing shoulder to shoulder with other truckers. Some held poster boards that read, “Take down AB 5!!!” and “AB 5 Has Got to Go!,” he said.“This is taking away my independence,” Mr. Ochoa said. “It’s my right to be an independent driver.”Noam Scheiber More

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    Gopuff Buys Time for Its 30-Minutes-or-Less Delivery Promise

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    The $15 billion rapid-delivery start-up decided to do business differently from rivals like Instacart. A changing environment is testing its model.From its beginning in 2013, Gopuff aimed to do rapid delivery differently.The start-up’s founders, Yakir Gola and Rafael Ilishayev, based the company in Philadelphia, away from other delivery ventures in Silicon Valley and New York. They opened warehouses and bought their own merchandise, instead of acting as middlemen who connected retailers and restaurants with customers. And they promised speed, delivering food and other items in 30 minutes or less.By late last year, Gopuff had amassed $3.4 billion in funding, bought the alcohol and beverage retailer BevMo! and was valued at $15 billion. This year, it appeared poised to go public.“We built a sustainable business that thrives and that is set up to win long term,” Mr. Gola, 29, said in an interview last month. Gopuff, he added, is “a disrupter.”Now the question is whether Gopuff has done delivery differently enough. In the past few months, the start-up environment has changed from boom to uncertainty, as tech stocks have cratered, inflation has risen, interest rates have increased and the economic outlook has darkened.In response, Gopuff recently put off its public listing and is trying to raise $1 billion in debt that could potentially be turned into stock. The unprofitable company also lowered its drivers’ minimum pay in California. This year, it has done two rounds of job cuts, including last month when it laid off about 450 people, or 3 percent of its 15,000 workers.Gopuff faces a dismal history of failed delivery start-ups, from Webvan and Kozmo.com in the early 2000s to Buyk, 1520 and Fridge No More in the past few months. Delivery — with high labor and transportation costs, stiff competition and lofty marketing expenses — is notoriously expensive and logistically complicated to provide and make money on.While delivery companies such as DoorDash and Grubhub have gone public, many of them lose money, and some have later been acquired. And with the bump in pandemic orders tailing off, many of these companies are hitting hurdles. Last month, the grocery delivery start-up Instacart cut its valuation to about $24 billion from $39 billion.“These companies are fine during a very ebullient and frothy capital markets environment,” said Ken Smythe, the chief executive of Next Round Capital Partners, which advises investors buying and selling stakes in start-ups. “The world has changed significantly in the past 60 days.”Gopuff’s delivery people are gig workers. The business also has warehouses where its workers are full-time employees.Gabby Jones for The New York TimesIn the interview, Mr. Gola acknowledged that delivery was “very logistically complex — it takes a lot of time and a lot of effort and capital.” But having warehouses and inventory is the only way to profit over time, he said, because it allows the company to make money from selling goods and not just charging delivery fees.“Once you can execute, and obviously that’s hard, it wins in the long term,” he said.Gopuff added that it was putting a public offering on the back burner because the stock market had been volatile and it had enough cash on hand. The layoffs were part of a global restructuring, it said.Mr. Gola and Mr. Ilishayev met as students at Drexel University in Philadelphia in 2011. In their sophomore year, they founded Gopuff for college students, offering fast late-night deliveries of junk food, condoms and smoking paraphernalia. They called themselves a “one-stop puff shop,” which led to the name Gopuff. Deliveries were available until 4:20 a.m.To set themselves apart from DoorDash and Instacart, which connect customers to restaurants and grocery stores via their apps and rely on gig workers, Mr. Gola and Mr. Ilishayev decided Gopuff would buy goods from distributors and wholesalers and have warehouses. Its warehouse workers would be full-time employees, though its delivery drivers and bike messengers would be contractors.Mr. Gola, who dropped out of college, and Mr. Ilishayev, who graduated from Drexel with a degree in legal studies, became co-chief executives of Gobrands, Gopuff’s parent company. To fund the business, they sold used office furniture on Craigslist and eBay. They also offered discounts on orders to attract customers and charged just $2.95 for delivery.As Gopuff gained traction beyond Drexel students, Mr. Gola and Mr. Ilishayev expanded their product offerings and set up warehouses in Boston, Washington and Austin, Texas. Starting in 2016, the company raised money from venture firms such as Anthos Capital and, later, investors including the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank.“We saw it in the data: customers coming back multiple times every month, very strong customer retention, customers who would stick around forever, basically,” said Jett Fein, a partner at Headline, a venture capital firm that invested in Gopuff.In 2020, the pandemic sent Gopuff’s business into overdrive as people shied away from shopping in person and relied on deliveries. Billions of dollars in new venture capital flooded in.Mr. Gola and Mr. Ilishayev went on a spending spree. That November, Gopuff acquired the California retailer BevMo! for $350 million, giving it a foothold in the state as well as the chain’s liquor licenses. In Europe, it bought the delivery start-ups Fancy and Dija.The company also started offering a $5.95 monthly subscription for delivery and began an advertising business.Gopuff now has nearly 700 warehouses that deliver to 1,200 cities in North America and Europe. It also has several retail locations in New York, Texas and Florida, where customers can walk in and shop.But profits have been elusive. The start-up is not cash-flow positive, which means it is spending more money than it is taking in, said Scott Minerd, the chief investment officer of Guggenheim Investments, which has invested in Gopuff. He added that the company had paused some plans to open new warehouses.Gopuff spends more on property and salaries of warehouse workers than its rivals, said John Mercer, head of global research at the firm Coresight Research. Discounts to attract customers have also eaten into revenue.Gopuff said it made money in its first three years. Its 2020 revenue was $340 million, according to a company document for potential landlords that was obtained by The New York Times. The document also showed that Gopuff’s cash balance dropped $111 million that year to $521 million.Revenue totaled $2 billion last year, Gopuff said. The company also lost $500 million, which was first reported by Axios.Some of its spending has gone toward handling delivery issues, said four former warehouse and district managers, three of whom declined to be identified because of severance agreements with the company. Several said they had sometimes spent hundreds or thousands of dollars a day on Instacart or at grocery stores to replenish Gopuff’s “never out of stock” staples like bacon, eggs and milk.At other times, suppliers sent pallets of items like ice cream that were not needed and could not be stored.“I would throw away $1,000, $2,000, $3,000 in inventory as soon as I received it because I had nowhere to put it,” said Anthony Nelson, who managed two Gopuff warehouses in Houston from 2019 through 2021. “That happened at least once or twice a week at bare minimum.”Mr. Gola said Gopuff bought items from Instacart or local retailers less than 1 percent of the time and threw out less inventory than the industry standard.The start-up has also faced questions over its use of gig workers, many of whom sign up for shifts with the company and report to managers. In 2018, the Labor Department found that Gopuff had misclassified delivery drivers in Pennsylvania as independent contractors.“Gopuff’s entire business model depends on flagrant misclassification of a kind that’s shocking well beyond what we see even from other gig companies,” said David Seligman, a lawyer who filed a 2017 class-action lawsuit claiming Gopuff wrongly categorized its drivers as contractors. The suit was settled in 2019.In November, hundreds of Gopuff gig workers went on strike, said Candace Hinson, a delivery driver in Philadelphia who helped organize the stoppage.Mr. Gola said the company used gig workers as drivers, rather than hiring employees, because “that’s what they want.” The company disputed that hundreds had gone on strike and said the workers’ action had not hurt its business.In the interview, Mr. Gola insisted that Gopuff would be the company to crack the instant delivery code.“The world is moving toward instant,” he said, “and Gopuff is at the forefront of that.” More

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    Washington State Advances Landmark Deal on Gig Drivers’ Job Status

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    Lawmakers have passed legislation granting benefits and protections, but allowing Lyft and Uber to continue to treat drivers as contractors.The Washington State Senate on Friday passed a bill granting gig drivers certain benefits and protections while preventing them from being classified as employees — a longstanding priority of ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft.While the vote appears to pave the way for ultimate passage after a similar measure passed the state House of Representatives last week, the two bills would still have to be reconciled before being sent to the governor for approval. Gov. Jay Inslee has not said whether he intends to sign the legislation.Mike Faulk, a spokesman for Mr. Inslee, said Friday that the governor’s office usually did not “speculate on bill action,” adding, “Once legislators send it to our office, we’ll evaluate it.”The Senate legislation — the result of a compromise between the companies and at least one prominent local union, the Teamsters — was approved 40 to 8.The action follows the collapse of similar efforts in California and New York amid resistance from other unions and worker advocates, who argued that gig drivers should not have to settle for second-class status.Under the compromise, drivers would receive benefits like paid sick leave and a minimum pay rate while transporting customers. The bill would also create a process for drivers to appeal so-called deactivations, which prevent them from finding work through the companies’ apps.But the minimum wage wouldn’t cover the time they spend working without a passenger in the car — a considerable portion of most drivers’ days. And like independent contractors, they could not unionize under federal law.One especially controversial feature of the bill is that it would block local jurisdictions from regulating drivers’ rights. A similar feature helped ignite opposition that killed the prospects for such a bill in New York State last year.Looming in the background of the legislative action in Washington State was the possibility of a ballot measure that could have enacted similar changes with weaker benefits for drivers. After California passed a law in 2019 that effectively classified gig workers as employees, Uber, Lyft and other gig companies spent roughly $200 million on a ballot measure that rolled back those protections. The legislation is still being litigated after a state judge deemed it unconstitutional. More

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    Unemployment Benefits to Millions Are About to End

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    The abrupt loss of pandemic unemployment benefits on a broad scale could have long-term effects not only for the recipients but also for the economy.PHILADELPHIA — Tara Harrison has a master’s degree, yet is applying for the low-paying receptionist jobs she last held as a teenager. Evan Ocheret is considering giving up his career in music. Amanda McCarty is worried about losing her place in the middle class. Amanda Rinehart is considering borrowing money from her grandmother or selling blood plasma to feed herself and her son.Unemployment benefits have helped stave off financial ruin for millions of laid-off workers over the last year and a half. After this week, that lifeline will snap: An estimated 7.5 million people will lose their benefits when federally funded emergency unemployment programs end. Millions more will see their checks cut by $300 a week.The cutoff is the latest and arguably the largest of the benefit “cliffs” that jobless workers have faced during the pandemic. Last summer, the government ended a $600 weekly supplement that workers received early in the crisis, but other programs remained in place. In December, benefits briefly lapsed for millions of workers, but Congress quickly restored them.This time, no similar rescue appears likely. President Biden has encouraged states with high unemployment rates to use existing federal funds to extend benefits, but few appear likely to do so. And administration officials have said repeatedly that they will not seek a congressional extension of the benefits.The politics of this cliff are different in part because it affects primarily Democratic-leaning states. Roughly half of states, nearly all of them with Republican governors, have already ended some or all of the federal benefits on the grounds that they were discouraging people from returning to work. So far, there is little evidence they were right: States that cut off benefits have experienced job growth this summer that was little different from that in states that retained the programs.In the states that kept the benefits, the cutoff will mean the loss of billions of dollars a week in aid when the pandemic is resurgent and the economic recovery is showing signs of fragility. And for workers and their families, it will mean losing their only source of income as other pandemic programs, such as the federal eviction moratorium, are ending. Even under the most optimistic forecasts, it will take months for everyone losing aid to find a job, with potentially long-term consequences for both workers and the economy.“I have no idea what I’m going to do once these benefits stop,” Ms. Rinehart said.When the pandemic began, Ms. Rinehart, 33, was an assistant general manager at a hotel in Allentown, Pa. She held on to her job at first, taking her young son with her to work. But when that proved untenable, she left the job, and has been unemployed ever since, most recently living on about $560 a week in benefits, all of which will end this weekend.A single mother, Ms. Rinehart has been unwilling to send her son, now 8, back to the classroom because he has asthma and several other health conditions that make him especially vulnerable to the coronavirus. He is too young to be vaccinated and too young to be left alone, and she has been unable to find a job that would let her work from home.“They should not cut these benefits off until there is a vaccine for all the little humans of all ages, because there are parents like me that have children that are high risk for Covid,” she said.Ms. Rinehart is one of nearly half a million Pennsylvanians who will lose their benefits this weekend, according to estimates from the Century Foundation, a progressive research institute. The state has an unemployment rate of 6.6 percent, well above the national rate of 5.4 percent.Pennsylvania, like the country as a whole, has experienced a significant economic rebound, but a partial one: Domestic tourists this summer again lined up to see Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, and thrill-seekers again rode the roller coasters at Hersheypark. But many downtown offices in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh remain all but empty, and conventioneers have not yet returned to conference hotels, or to the restaurants and bars that relied on their business. Overall, Pennsylvania has regained about two-thirds of the jobs lost in the pandemic, compared with about three-quarters nationally.“There’s been a partial recovery in a lot of the industries that are shut down, but it’s not back to where it was,” said Barney Oursler, director of the Mon Valley Unemployed Committee, a workers’ rights group in Pittsburgh. The committee was formed in the 1980s in response to layoffs in the steel industry; it has had a second life in the pandemic, helping thousands of Pennsylvanians navigate the state’s unemployment system.Mr. Ocheret, 32, is a professional oboist in Philadelphia. Before the pandemic, he cobbled together a living as a freelancer, performing with symphonies and opera companies up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and picking up the occasional gig with pop artists who wanted onstage orchestra sections. It all dried up almost overnight in March 2020.Performances began to return this spring, and Mr. Ocheret recently picked up a once-a-week gig that will last into September with an orchestra in New Jersey. But his calendar remains sparse this fall, and without unemployment benefits to fall back on, he isn’t sure how he will get by. He has signed up for computer coding courses to give him another option — one that he doesn’t want to take, but that he says he may have to consider if the industry doesn’t rebound by the end of the year.“I hate to stop doing the thing I love,” Mr. Ocheret said. “But if things don’t start to improve, I may have to do something different.”Before the pandemic, Evan Ocheret, a professional oboist in Philadelphia, made a living as a freelancer.Hannah Yoon for The New York TimesThree federal programs will end this weekend. One, which extended regular benefits beyond the 26 weeks offered in most states, covers about 3.3 million people, according to the Century Foundation. A second program, Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, covers 4.2 million gig workers, the self-employed and others who don’t qualify for standard benefits. Nearly three million additional people will lose a $300 weekly federal supplement to other unemployment benefits.When Congress last renewed the programs in March, as part of Mr. Biden’s American Rescue Plan, policymakers hoped that September would represent a return to normal for the economy. If most Americans were vaccinated and the pandemic was under control, then schools and offices could reopen and people could return to work.But the rise of the Delta variant has complicated that picture. Major employers across the country have shelved their return-to-office plans. International tourism remains largely shut down, and restaurants, which were packed for much of the summer, are seeing reservations slow.“We’re in a different place now than we thought we were going to be,” Ms. McCarty said. “The Sept. 6 deadline made sense maybe in May and June. It seems preposterous now.”Ms. McCarty, 43, was furloughed as a buyer for a large Philadelphia clothing retailer at the start of the pandemic. A few months later, the job loss turned permanent, reshaping the McCartys’ lives.The family moved from Philadelphia to Lancaster County in search of cheaper housing. Ms. McCarty’s husband, a graphic designer, earns enough to pay rent, but they are still figuring out how to cover their other bills without the roughly $900 a week they were getting in unemployment benefits. Their 19-year-old daughter has set aside her college plans. And Ms. McCarty, a cancer survivor, is putting off medical tests until she can afford to pay the deductible on her insurance plan.“You put 10, 15, 20 years into a career and then to suddenly not be able to go see a dentist anymore, it feels like something’s wrong there,” she said. “I think I’m still grieving the loss of my opportunity of being middle class, because that’s gone again.”Regular unemployment benefits, without the $300 add-on, replace only a fraction of workers’ lost wages. In Pennsylvania, the maximum benefit is $580 a week, the equivalent of about $30,000 a year. In some Southern states, the maximum benefit is less than $300 a week.Still, decades of economic research have shown that unemployment benefits are at least a bit of a disincentive to seeking work. When the economy is weak, that negative consequence is offset by the positive impact the benefits have on workers, but many economists argue that it makes sense to ramp down benefits as the economy improves.Cutting off benefits for millions of people all at once, however, is another matter.“Losing a job is something that we know from research is one of the most damaging things to your financial and personal well-being over the long run,” said Andrew Stettner, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation. “We’ve avoided those kinds of long-term impacts to a large part during the pandemic because we’ve been aggressive with our forms of support. Now we’re pulling it back, we’re putting people at risk.”Ms. Harrison, despite her master’s degree, has already lost her job twice since the pandemic began. She was furloughed from her human resources job early on. She eventually found work helping to run a Covid-testing business, but was laid off again in March as the pandemic began to ebb. Now she spends her days scouring job boards and sending applications.“It’s going to end,” she said of the unemployment benefits. “You know it’s going to end. So you can’t just sit around and twiddle your thumbs.”Her husband has diabetes and high blood pressure, and they live with her mother, so Ms. Harrison, 47, is reluctant to return to in-person work until the pandemic is under control. Despite having a master’s degree and senior-level experience, she is applying for positions as a receptionist or an administrative assistant — jobs she last did decades ago.“I spent years in school — I spent money out of my own pocket to better educate myself — so that I would be able to be a good breadwinner and take care of my family,” she said. “Never did I think I would be applying to be somebody’s receptionist. But if somebody called me to be their receptionist, I’m taking it.”Jim Tankersley More

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    Uber and Lyft Ramp Up Efforts to Shield Business Model

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    Gig economy companies are backing state laws in New York and elsewhere that would cement drivers’ status as contractors in exchange for a union.After California passed a law in 2019 that effectively gave gig workers the legal standing of employees, companies like Uber and Lyft spent some $200 million on a ballot initiative exempting their drivers. More