Instacart is mess­ing with work­ers’ tips, again. The company’s work­ers are so fed up hun­dreds of them are out on strike this week.

Instacart—a gig econ­o­my com­pa­ny for same-day gro­cery deliv­ery — has had prob­lems with tip­ping date back to 2016. At that time, Instacart removed tip­ping from the app, before being shamed into rein­stat­ing a tip­ping pol­i­cy the next month. Then, in 2018, the com­pa­ny altered its pol­i­cy again by count­ing cus­tomer tips toward work­ers’ guar­an­teed $10 base pay — lead­ing to sit­u­a­tions where cus­tomers were pay­ing almost the full base, with lit­tle con­tri­bu­tion from Instacart. Now, Instacart is tak­ing aim at the default tip amount. When cus­tomers fin­ish their Instacart orders, the app had pre­vi­ous­ly sug­gest­ed a tip of 10%. This was uni­lat­er­al­ly dis­con­tin­ued and replaced by a 5% default.

In response to the default tip change, Instacart work­er and orga­niz­er Vanes­sa Bain penned an impas­sioned Medi­um post last month which inspired a walk­out of more than a thou­sand work­ers demand­ing rein­state­ment of the 10% default. Instead of improv­ing con­di­tions in the work­place, their col­lec­tive action was met with dis­cour­ag­ing news. Two days after the walk-out, Instacart slashed work­ers’ ​“qual­i­ty” bonus pay — one of the only remain­ing pay incen­tives on the app, and an incen­tive that has been alleged to make up to 40% of the aver­age Instacart work­ers’ already low income (some esti­mates put this between 30 and 35%). The com­pa­ny also did not respond to the con­cerns work­ers aired in the Medi­um post.

Start­ing Decem­ber 16 and extend­ing to Decem­ber 21, over 300 Instacart work­ers are expect­ed to strike again to chal­lenge Instacart’s incen­tive cut, tip default changes, and declin­ing work con­di­tions gen­er­al­ly, with events sched­uled each day.

Amid mount­ing out­rage, Instacart has attempt­ed to deflect crit­i­cism by vague­ly cit­ing data. ​“Dur­ing the last year, we offered a new ver­sion of the qual­i­ty bonus and found that it did not mean­ing­ful­ly improve qual­i­ty,” the com­pa­ny told shop­pers over email in Novem­ber, after the first walk­out. ​“As a result, we will no longer be offer­ing the qual­i­ty bonus begin­ning next week.”

Through this state­ment, the com­pa­ny blamed unver­i­fied, unex­plained met­rics for the cuts, not its own exploita­tive mod­el. The met­ric is pre­sum­ably based on data, but work­ers and con­sumers are nev­er giv­en insight into that data. While the jar­gon is new, the under­ly­ing real­i­ty is not: A clos­er exam­i­na­tion reveals this is just a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for good, old-fash­ioned exploitation.

By what met­ric does Instacart mea­sure whether an incen­tive can ​“mean­ing­ful­ly improve” qual­i­ty? For an improve­ment to be ​“mean­ing­ful,” what quan­ti­ta­tive or qual­i­ta­tive fac­tors must be present? Is there a spe­cif­ic ​“qual­i­ty” that is being mea­sured, and how does it take into account work­er qual­i­ty of life? Fur­ther­more, how does the com­pa­ny jus­ti­fy the gap between its low­est- and high­est-paid employ­ees? The aver­age Instacart exec­u­tive com­pen­sa­tion is $279,596 a year — with the most com­pen­sat­ed exec­u­tive mak­ing $790,000. In con­trast, the aver­age Instacart work­er is mak­ing between $9.81 and $12.96 an hour.

By brush­ing off work­er com­plaints through ref­er­ences to unex­plained data that is avail­able to nei­ther work­ers nor con­sumers, Instacart is attempt­ing to uti­lize an insid­i­ous rhetor­i­cal tac­tic: ​“math­wash­ing.”

Coined by tech-entre­pre­neur Fred Benen­son, the term ​“math­wash­ing” can be used to describe attempts to use math terms like ​“algo­rithm” to gloss over a more sub­jec­tive real­i­ty. In the case of Instacart, algo­rithms are being used to jus­ti­fy poor work con­di­tions, since a face­less algo­rithm is more con­ve­nient to blame than the greedy boss­es behind the deci­sions. Benen­son is clear in describ­ing why this is a problem.

“This habit goes way back to the ear­ly days of com­put­ers when they were first enter­ing busi­ness­es in the 1960s and 1970s,” he stat­ed, in an inter­view with Tech​ni​cal​.ly Brook­lyn. ​“Every­one hoped the answers they sup­plied were more true than what humans could come up with, but they even­tu­al­ly real­ized com­put­ers were only as good as their programmers.”

Though Benen­son orig­i­nal­ly used the term to describe how Facebook’s trend­ing top­ics were not neu­tral, but instead manip­u­lat­ed by Facebook’s data engi­neers, it arguably applies to Instacart and a lot of the ​“don’t blame the boss­es, blame the algo­rithm” lan­guage that is com­mon across the gig econ­o­my. While oth­er com­pa­nies like Uber and AirBnb have relied on this rhetoric, how­ev­er, Instacart is a par­tic­u­lar­ly egre­gious abuser.

Talk­ing with TechCrunch in 2016, CEO Apoor­va Mehta relied on jar­gon and abstract lan­guage to defend work­ers’ low wages. He praised his work­ers’ ​“NPS score” and not­ed that wages were ​“not a zero-sum game” because ​“the prob­lem that we’re try­ing to solve is very hard.”

Instacart’s process for decid­ing how to del­e­gate orders is described by its web­site as a ​“Sto­chas­tic Capac­i­tat­ed Vehi­cle Rout­ing Prob­lem with Time Win­dows for Mul­ti­ple Trips.” In describ­ing deliv­ery sce­nar­ios, Instacart’s web­site dis­cuss­es using ​“time-based sim­u­la­tions” to replay ​“the his­to­ry of cus­tomer and shop­per behav­iors with the exist­ing algo­rithm and the new one.” The sec­tion shows col­or­ful graphs and charts that fail to describe most of their vari­ables, includ­ing one that sim­ply lists ​“met­ric” instead of even pre­tend­ing to have a quan­ti­ty for mea­sur­ing effi­cien­cy. The lan­guage is so loaded with jar­gon and ital­ics that it is like­ly inac­ces­si­ble to the aver­age con­sumer or worker.

While this jar­gon con­veys lit­tle, Instacart uses it to mar­ket the company’s ​“genius” design. To help read­ers under­stand that they are deal­ing with a com­pa­ny that is much smarter than them­selves, Instacart includes a gro­cery-inspired illus­tra­tion of Albert Ein­stein to accom­pa­ny expla­na­tions of its black-box algo­rithim. Instead of leav­ing with a sense of awe, how­ev­er, read­ers leave with a sense of hav­ing par­tic­i­pat­ed in a game of smoke and mir­rors. The expla­na­tion reads less like a help­ful primer and more like a des­per­ate attempt to get con­sumers to believe any­thing oth­er than the truth. Name­ly, that the com­pa­ny is the ​“despot” in con­trol of its own algo­rithm.

This is not a mar­vel of tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion. It is a mar­vel of exploita­tion. You don’t need an advanced math­e­mat­ics degree to know the score.