Last year, the Seattle City Council passed legislationmeant to guarantee workers for app-based companies like Instacart and DoorDash make at least the city’s minimum wage, currently more than $18 an hour. Earlier this year,Seattle also became the first city in the country to provide gig workers sick and safety leave.
Now, council members want to try to stop app-based companies from unjustly deactivating workers. In other words, suddenly terminating them.
Council staff say they’ve heard reports of workers being deactivated for not taking on enough orders. Others said it was for tardiness caused by circumstances beyond their control, such as difficulty finding parking, gaining entrance to a building, or the West Seattle Bridge being closed. Some gig workers aren’t even sure why they were terminated.
The Council is now proposing app-based companies, like Instacart, notify and investigate workers before deactivating them.
Councilmember Lisa Herbold said under her proposal companies will still have the power to fire workers for all kinds of reasons. But companies would have to give workers 14 days notice.
Some businesses have pushed back on the proposal over concerns of not being able to immediately stop dangerous workers from making a delivery.
Tammie Hetrick of the Washington Food Industry Association said she wants to create a safe shopping environment for both gig workers and businesses.
“It's not a common occurrence. But when it does occur, we have these gig workers that will come in to shop for a customer, and they'll become irate or belligerent or just destroy the store,” Hetrick said in a recent interview. “And so we want to be sure we have that opportunity to stop that and protect our customers before that person gets to their door.”
Herbold made clear that her proposal is meant to create transparency around the process of deactivations, and halt firings that are unfair.
“We are only identifying things that people can't be deactivated for,” Herbold said. “So, to the extent that people have expressed concern about for instance, not being able to deactivate an app-based worker, because that app-based worker engaged in racial slurs, the deactivation policy would allow that person to be terminated."
The draft proposal includes a provision that would allow app-based companies to deactivate a worker before completing an investigation in the case of egregious behavior, such as sexual harassment.
The Seattle City Council is expected to vote on the measure next month.
