The week-long stand-off between Blinkit and its delivery partners over a new pay structure showed signs of easing up on Tuesday as the grocery delivery app went online at several locations in the Delhi NCR region.
The ‘temporarily unavailable’ notification is popping up at some locations in Gurugram, but most of the dark stores in New Delhi and Noida are operational after delivery partners returned to work.
On Monday evening, a Blinkit spokesperson told CNBC-TV18 that it is ‘engaging with all delivery partners to help them understand the new payout structure and said, “almost all our stores are operational now across NCR.”
However, the ‘Blinkit Strike’, the workers’ unions say, is cooling off after screenshots of messages sent by the company to the protesting delivery partners surfaced on Monday. Blinkit appeared to warn the workers that it will shut several dark stores permanently and revoke their access to the app, as all attempts at reconciliation had failed.
“Most of the delivery partners have returned to work because of fear,” said Harish Gautam of the App Workers’ Union (AWU), which has been coordinating the protests across the Delhi NCR region.
“The company is giving veiled threats to the workers by saying that the new pay structure is an opt-in exercise. This only implies that the company would excise any worker who would not opt for the new pay structure. Moreover, the company has also resorted to blocking the IDs of various striking workers which amounts to effectively firing them,” he explained.
“It should be noted that despite the intimidation by the company, the workers are still on strike across several Blinkit dark stores in Delhi NCR,” he added. For a week, the protests against the new rate card had led to the temporary shuttering of nearly half of the 200 dark stores that Blinkit operates in the national capital region.
Calling the new rate card “fair”, the Zomato-backed company refused to roll back the new payout structure released last Monday, which fixed the minimum fee at Rs 15 per delivery from Rs 25 earlier. It signaled a shift from a fixed-pay model to a hybrid one with a distance-based component. The delivery partners have claimed that the revised pay scale would cut their monthly earnings in half to about Rs 8,000 to Rs 10,000.
Representatives at workers’ unions pointed out that only a handful are on strike, while many have left the jobs altogether, finding the pay too low to sustain their livelihoods. “Many have either joined other e-commerce companies or returned to their villages,” said Gautam.
The delivery partners still-on-protest under the App Workers’ Union (AWU) are planning to approach the Union Labour Ministry, demanding that “the arbitrary imposition of the new pay structure be rescinded”.
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