Lyft and Uber said they will cease operations in Minneapolis after the city’s council voted Thursday to override a mayoral veto and require that ride-hailing services increase driver wages to the equivalent of the local minimum wage of $15.57 an hour.
Lyft called the ordinance “deeply flawed,” saying in a statement that it supports a minimum earning standard for drivers but not the one passed by the council.
That’s great but now all the Uber and Lyft drivers in Minneapolis will have to find a different gig.
Sure, I will believe Uber and Lyft are going to leave when they actually do.
See the thing is, as titanic as these “rideshare” companies are they don’t fucking do anything but maintain a shitty app and provide some kind of legal stability.
All it takes is for one functional socialist worker cooperative to get a basic ass rideshare app off the ground and if it starts to build serious momentum even in an American city or two all of a sudden the billions and billions of dollars that rideshare companies claim they are worth starts to turn invisible like one of those parts to a time travel movie where a character has begun to turn transparent and disappear because they have been erased from the timeline.
The vast majority of the time these companies aren’t going to want to take that risk, or if they do they are idiots for doing so.
We don’t need software companies like this the way we need electronics companies, grocery stores, power companies and other modern conveniences that take massive, physical organizations of material.
Sure software isn’t trivial to do, having that amount of servers isn’t trivial to do but how much do you REALLY need a year to fund development, hosting and maintenance of a rideshare app owned by a worker collective or open sourced? 5 million a year? That barely buys the CEO of Ubers office furnishings I bet.
I just posted elsewhere in this thread I hope they get something like Driver’s Cooperative.
Hell yeah!
It’ll be tough finding someone who can build a phone app that consumes both the Square API and the Google Maps API. /s
Minneapolis may have to settle for only 11 separate college students filling the gap out of their dorm rooms.
I’m an organizer, I’d gladly help gig drivers form a worker cooperative