Instawork is an app similar to Uber, but for the hospitality industry. They offer positions like bartender, server, and banquet staff in a temporary capacity.
They have long allowed a “glitch” that makes workers get marked as no-shows on a shift AFTER working the full shift, thus resulting in a withholding their pay.
They have a long, fully automated process to dispute this common glitch in their technology.
To top off not paying workers, they block their accounts, cancel the future shifts they had scheduled, and don’t allow them to schedule any more shifts until the dispute is resolved.
There are various other practices they have that are abhorrent which I’ll detail below.
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Venues routinely overbook instaworkers, promise them an 8 hour shift, then send them home an hour into the shift claiming they aren’t needed. To get around paying for these workers, the venue will give them a 0 star rating
1a. Instaworks recommendation is to arrive 1-2 hours early, unpaid, to guarantee yourself a spot -
The zero star rating affects your pay per hour level, your access to quality shifts, and the order in which you get notified of open shifts, which are all first come first serve
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Instawork’s customer service has no phone number to call and offers literally no ability for a worker to communicate with instawork (who claim they represent the worker). Routinely there are labor issues and exploitations on a shift that a worker has no way of addressing during the shift or in real-time
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Instawork puts blind faith in their clients and their reviews of workers, despite the obvious incentive for their clients to give negative reviews that aren’t justified in order to avoid paying for their overbooking mistakes