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The Drivers Cooperative

drivers.coop

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Re: The Drivers Cooperative

#71

Post by throwinreturn »

throwaway2a02 wrote: post #50

> While Uber and Lyft make their money for Wall Street and Silicon Valley investors, we will be a co-operative. So any profits will go back to the drivers. Can't they set it up as a non-profit? What almost always happens in these cases is that most of shares are owned by the first few workers, and ultimately a small group will control the whole business (at which point they will obviously won't drive for the app anym…

Some cooperatives mandate one worker one vote, rather than one share one vote. The most well-known example is Mondragon.

Re: The Drivers Cooperative

#72

Post by yholio »

sm4rk0 wrote: post #58
yholio wrote: post #51

What keeps Uber competitive is access to a relatively cheap reservoir of labor force. They mediate this process where drivers compete against each other and extract a good rent in the process. The focus should be getting rid of the rent, not the competition. While I wish these guys all the best and think it's a good paradigm shift, I don't think they will be successful for the same reasons most cooperatives aren't su…

> What keeps Uber competitive is access to a relatively cheap reservoir of labor force. Cheap labor force means someone is underpaid. If the coop cuts the middlemen out and transfer the extra to drivers then it's a win-win: drivers get more and customers pay the same for a better service because well-paid driver => good service.

Underpaid compared to what? If people are willing to do the work to a high professional standard for a certain wage, than that is the right compensation for that job. When you setup arbitrary fair wages above market, you must also somehow protect them from intruders from other fields willing to change jobs and benefit from the higher wages in your field. This is exactly what a co-op ends up doing most of the time - if they don't succumb to a traditional model where the initial members become the owners and the later employees have regular employment contracts.

Re: The Drivers Cooperative

#73

Post by aenario »

carlio wrote: post #65
otar wrote: post #62

Good model. Hopefully this will take off and expand to moped drivers as well.

There is a coop for delivery cyclists, started in France I believe - https://coopcycle.org/en/

The interesting thing about coopcycle is that it's actually a coop of coops :

Several local delivery coops (say one per city) collaborate to fund development and hosting of the software solution.

Re: The Drivers Cooperative

#74

Post by bloudermilk »

throwaway2a02 wrote: post #50

> While Uber and Lyft make their money for Wall Street and Silicon Valley investors, we will be a co-operative. So any profits will go back to the drivers. Can't they set it up as a non-profit? What almost always happens in these cases is that most of shares are owned by the first few workers, and ultimately a small group will control the whole business (at which point they will obviously won't drive for the app anym…

I've read several books on cooperatives including case studies on how fail and I've never heard this. Do you have some examples of where this was an issue?

One common issue I have heard about is early members acquiring disproportionate social capital, but that's a different problem with different solutions.

Re: The Drivers Cooperative

#75

Post by throwinreturn »

CameronNemo wrote: post #23
mannerheim wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber invested a lot of money into self-driving cars. Presumably a coop isn't spending money on automating away their workers.

That is actually an interesting point. Why would I, as a driver, fund research and development aimed at making my skills worthless?

That would probably be competition. A monopolist corporation has no incentive to improve its capital if it gets its profit anyway (c.f. the dismal state of DSL and cable). But if it's not a monopolist, it might be forced to anyway.

It's the same thing at a worker cooperative, or for that matter at a heavily unionized workplace: the workers have no incentive to automate themselves out of a job, but may collectively understand that if they don't, the business will go under and they'll all be left without jobs.

Re: The Drivers Cooperative

#77

Post by ThePhysicist »

In Germany we have some really large organizations that are organized as cooperatives (Genossenschaften), e.g. banks (Volksbanken/Raiffeisenbanken) but also tech companies like DATEV eG that build software for their members (tax accountants in that case) and make close to 1 BN€ in revenue. So it can work.

Re: The Drivers Cooperative

#78

Post by jasode »

zxexz wrote: post #15

I hope this takes off. Ride-hailing apps always seemed like a model that was extremely conducive to a cooperative, worker-owned model. I would gladly (and will try to next time I'm in NYC) use this service over Uber or Lyft. Power to the drivers!

>Ride-hailing apps always seemed like a model that was extremely conducive to a cooperative, worker-owned model.

It's only the surface-level of an ride-hailing app that seems easy for worker-owned cooperatives to create. In reality, the extra expensive programming dollars required to tame the hidden complexity so that the app can present a seamless experience to the customers/passengers is a huge factor that works against co-ops.

E.g. see the famous Uber comment on the complexity of the app: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25376346

Real-life customers don't want to enter their credit-card details into City_X_driver_coop and then re-enter their financial details multiple times again into City_Y_driver_coop. Even if you imagine a hypothetical national co-op to consolidate multiple cities, customers would still then have inconvenience of Country_X_coop and Country-Y_coop.

It takes a lot of capital to pay programmer salaries for desirable features that customers want and since co-ops are capital-constrained (by definition because they can't take millions in investors money), the app will always have less features compared to Uber/Lyft.

That's the financial constraint that causes co-ops to more easily organize in lower complexity businesses such as local grocery co-op or a farming coop. But a high-tech complexity business that's expensive to build is inherently too costly for a pool of drivers' savings to fund.

Whenever you see the phrase "worker-owned", mentally substitute "capital-constrained" -- and it starts to make sense why many businesses domains don't have any coops rising up to compete with VC-fueled startups.

EDIT to reply: >Driver co-ops or smaller operators simply don’t need to worry about half the nonsense in the comment you linked

Sure, the driver co-ops can choose to not spend capital on "useless" features but this leaves out the fact that customers can also choose not to use the co-ops because of the lower quality app experience. Keep in mind the behavior of customers who prioritize conveniences.

E.g. the non-profit RideAustin app fails customers even after Uber/Lyft left Austin: https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/12/austin-is-fine-without-ube...

It takes capital to build tech solutions that deal with peak load. And RideAustin later shuts down in 2020: https://www.google.com/search?q=rideaustin+shuts+down

Well, one might say RideAustin was hampered by coronavirus lockdowns. That's true, but it also takes capital to get past an economic downturn of low revenue. Uber/Lyft got hurt by COVID as well but they had more capital reserves to deal with it.

Re: The Drivers Cooperative

#79

Post by jwr »

This is doubly ironic and amusing if you think about how Uber/Lyft were "disrupting" the existing markets. Well, market forces are at work: if Uber/Lyft provide no additional value over drivers' work (and treat drivers as disposable assets), they themselves will get "disrupted" and the drivers will get rid of them :-)

Happy to see this happening, and I wonder how this will develop.

Re: The Drivers Cooperative

#80

Post by 88 »

jasode wrote: post #78
zxexz wrote: post #15

I hope this takes off. Ride-hailing apps always seemed like a model that was extremely conducive to a cooperative, worker-owned model. I would gladly (and will try to next time I'm in NYC) use this service over Uber or Lyft. Power to the drivers!

>Ride-hailing apps always seemed like a model that was extremely conducive to a cooperative, worker-owned model. It's only the surface-level of an ride-hailing app that seems easy for worker-owned cooperatives to create. In reality, the extra expensive programming dollars required to tame the hidden complexity so that the app can present a seamless experience to the customers/passengers is a huge factor that works ag…

Let’s not pretend back-end taxi/private hire vehicle dispatch is either a complex problem, or one that Uber solved themselves.

They added a glossy mobile app to the equation. Many others have since done the same.

Driver co-ops or smaller operators simply don’t need to worry about half the nonsense in the comment you linked (support for dozens of languages and payment methods, integration with other first or third party services, etc.)

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