Amazon, Instacart workers strike over COVID-19 safety concerns

Employees of Amazon, Whole Foods, and Instacart are striking over safety concerns related to the COVID-19 outbreak, highlighting the unique risks that essential service workers face amid the coronavirus crisis. Yahoo! Finance's Melody Hahm joins The Final Round to discuss.

Video Transcript

JEN ROGERS: So as we continue to have social distancing in place, and it has been extended now by the president, more people are staying home. But there are people that are going to work as well. And some people are starting to call this the white-collar quarantine, as workers from Amazon, Instacart, Walmart, are going to work to make sure everybody else has the food and supplies they need.

Melody Hahm is covering this story for us today, because some of those workers on their own frontlines are having concerns about their safety, and are taking some measures now. Melody, can you update us on what's happening at these companies?

MELODY HAHM: Yes, Jen, and as we think about it, there's always push and pull, right? So to your point, a lot of white-collar workers have the luxury and privilege of working from home, like all of us. But who are we are depending on? We're depending on many of those blue-collar workers, who are delivering us our food, our takeout, and the like.

Actually, today some 150 employees walked out of Amazon's Staten Island factory, demanding that the facility be shut down and cleaned after at least one staffer was actually reported to test positive for COVID-19 there. My understanding is that there are at least a couple who already have contracted the disease.

And, of course, these strikes are coming as Instacart has-- which currently has 150,000 shoppers, announced that they have plans to hire an additional 300,000 shoppers. And, of course, Amazon is planning to hire 100,000 during this stretch where there's so much demand. But Jen, shoppers are rightfully going on strike, because they're demanding access to basic things like hand sanitizer, disinfectant spray, and soap that they should not be paying for themselves.

They also are demanding hazard pay of an extra $5 per order, and a default tip amount of 10%, specifically when it comes to Instacart, because the default tip was set at 5%. And many people would actually put $0. During this month of March, though, we have heard from Instacart saying that 97% percent of shoppers did actually tip, which is a huge change from previous behavior, I think, as there's been more reporting that we should be supporting our community members in this way.

And then lastly, tomorrow Whole Foods employees will be calling in sick to demand paid leave for all workers who are staying home or are self-quarantined. And I want to point out that-- this is according to reporting from Vice, but it's the first national collective action led by workers at Whole Foods since the company was founded in 1980. So we use the word unprecedented quite a bit. But I think this just shows the wide disparity between the people who can afford to get all of these luxuries and the people who unfortunately are being burned out.

And honestly, even the orders are incomplete. People are very disgruntled from the shopping perspective. So it just shows that the benefit is very marginal at this point for a lot of folks.

And then just one statistic here-- 31% of US households or roughly 40 million Americans have used online grocery services in the month of March. That's according to new research. That's more than double the amount from six months ago. So just thinking about the pace at which it's accelerated, and, of course, the hiring is happening a little belatedly, because this was something that we could not have really forecasted would impact all of our lives in this way.