Teri Smith is one of over 130,000 workers who shop and deliver groceries for Instacart. Smith, 46, has worked for Instacart in Arlington, Texas, since August 2018.

Allison V. Smith for NPR

Kathleen Griesbach, Ph. D student in Sociology and an INCITE graduate fellow, was interviewed today on NPR’s All Things Considered. She discussed research from our Grocery Delivery Workers Project, including a recently published paper on the “algorithmic despotism” that the Instacart app imposes on its workers.

Listen to the radio segment below. You can read Alina Selyukh’s reported piece on the subject, which also references INCITE’s research, here.

Authors: Kathleen Griesbach , Adam Reich, Luke Elliott-Negri, and Ruth Milkman

Researchers at INCITE have published a new study analyzing the processes by which food delivery platforms like Instacart, Postmates, and GrubHub control their workers. Drawing on a survey of 955 food delivery workers and 55 in-depth interviews, the researchers found variation in the extent to which different platforms use algorithmic management to assign and evaluate work. Instacart, the largest grocery delivery platform, was found to regulate the time and activities of workers more stringently than other platform delivery companies, exerting a particularly demanding type of control that the authors term “algorithmic despotism.”

This study was conducted as part of INCITE’s Grocery Delivery Workers Project, which seeks to explore a variety of pertinent questions about the grocery delivery industry.

Read the full paper here, published in Socius, here.

Illustration: Jack Sachs for Bloomberg Business Week

"Instacart seems to demand that workers behave like employees, but they have none of the benefits of employment” - Kathleen Griesbach, INCITE Research Fellow

A recent article on Instacart workers, written by Josh Eidelson for Bloomberg Businessweek, references interview and survey data from a forthcoming study by Kathleen Griesbach, Adam Reich, Luke Elliott-Negri, and Ruth Milkman, conducted as part of INCITE’s Grocery Delivery Workers Project.

Read the full piece: Instacart Hounds Workers to Take Jobs That Aren’t Worth It