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The Drivers Cooperative

drivers.coop

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Re: The Drivers Cooperative

#271

Post by Mauricebranagh »

gruez wrote: post #164
jrochkind1 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are real challenges, nice outline of the capital issue. Coops generally have to get money by borrowing rather than equity investment. I'm for increasing federal programs for offering and subsidiziing loans to worker-owned coops -- like we do student loans -- not that that's a model, I realize, student loans don't work well, but just a demonstration that the federal government can subsidize loans in the public i…

>There are also hybrid models possible where workers own some % of the company -- over 50% if you want to consider it worker-controlled -- but investors also own a portion. but why would investors invest in a company that gives them half as much stake (because the other half goes to the workers)?

No that model is a worker coop - its how Poptel in the UK was structured.

Re: The Drivers Cooperative

#272

Post by zbyte64 »

patentatt wrote: post #202
sandworm101 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I applaud the effort, but the problem with a collective is that they are, legally speaking, a soft target. Uber can afford to break laws, run at a local loss, and generally throw its weight around a new market. Cooperatives don't have such deep pockets. They will leave town as soon as a some local interest resists. They aren't going to survive multi-year fights with cities or organizations like the London cabs.

But can’t they just ride the coattails of the big players? Once they’ve lobbied their way in, shouldn’t it be pretty easy for the coop to just say they should be treated the same? For that matter, I always wonder why Airbnb still exists. Now that they’ve bulldozed all sorts of local regulations with their VC money, why wouldn’t a coop model work better for the actual landlords? Something akin to the MLS for real esta…

Ostensibly yes because landlords would get a larger share of the surplus, but as long as capital writes regulations, entities that extract more surplus will be better able to change the rules. Just look at how much was spent in California to keep gig workers as contractors.

Re: The Drivers Cooperative

#273

Post by Mauricebranagh »

throwinreturn wrote: post #71
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.

Each worker has the same share in a coop its one of the key definitions so OMOV.

Re: The Drivers Cooperative

#274

Post by ryandrake »

bhupy wrote: post #259
ryandrake wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, OP was wrong to specifically call out "two devs" and HN, as it always is, was technically correct and called him out on it. Congratulations HN! Bad OP! I agree with the overall sentiment though: "What are all these people doing?" is a valid question against lots of Silicon Valley companies who are currently growing for the sake of growing. Yes, you need a few lawyers. Do you need 100 lawyers, each with executive…

> The unspoken side is that most companies simply measure your importance by how many people are under you, so everyone tries to hire as many people as they can get budget for, and build their empire. If we're throwing around conventional aphorisms, one could just as easily argue that most companies simply optimize for maximizing profits by minimizing labor costs, and therefore have an incentive to eliminate redundan…

I think the Uber example is a great read, and kind of makes my point. All that complexity and they are still losing money! All those payment methods, hundreds of megabytes of application binary, hundreds of backend teams, all of them very busy "doing things" but the company is not making money. Maybe they need to hire 60 more bizops ninjas.

Even with this thread, I have to say I'm kind of a hypocrite, since I'm one of these "support role" guys in my own company. I make it a goal every day to try to draw a clear understandable line between my work and the company making money. Some days it's not easy after 8 hours of TPS reports. I've been in roles where to this day I can't figure out how what I did made the company money. It was a lot simpler to explain when I was directly making the product.

Re: The Drivers Cooperative

#275

Post by yumraj »

njoubert wrote: post #180
kbos87 wrote: post #176

It's always surprised me that we haven't seem more attempts at co-op like models in spaces like this, and I'm happy to see it. Uber/Lyft strike me as thin businesses in the value that they actually provide both to riders and drivers. Yes, they were responsible for some initial innovation, but now the cat is out of the bag, and the concept could absolutely be applied in a business structure that is more profitable and…

The single benefit of Uber having a global presence likely already outweighs the value of these local coops. You can get off an airplane just about anywhere in the world and get an Uber. That’s huge value.

Sure, but I’ll bet that that is only a small part of the business.

Most of riders, I’ll say 90-95% in large cities are residents, (just a guess not based in real data) which fits very well with coop model.

Re: The Drivers Cooperative

#277

Post by sangnoir »

clarkevans wrote: post #187
njoubert wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The single benefit of Uber having a global presence likely already outweighs the value of these local coops. You can get off an airplane just about anywhere in the world and get an Uber. That’s huge value.

Cooperatives can expand by cooperating with other cooperatives -- a bunch of local cooperatives might nest to form a regional one, etc. Those regional ones could form a federation with a single identity for global operations. So, this problem can be addressed by cooperatives, it's just a different kind of structure that distributes power locally -- with centralized power deriving from the bottom up, by the membership…

The "big 4" accounting firms are structured similarly: a single global identity, but each country's org is independent, with local partners in charge and having partial ownership.

Re: The Drivers Cooperative

#278

Post by xsmasher »

patentatt wrote: post #202
sandworm101 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I applaud the effort, but the problem with a collective is that they are, legally speaking, a soft target. Uber can afford to break laws, run at a local loss, and generally throw its weight around a new market. Cooperatives don't have such deep pockets. They will leave town as soon as a some local interest resists. They aren't going to survive multi-year fights with cities or organizations like the London cabs.

But can’t they just ride the coattails of the big players? Once they’ve lobbied their way in, shouldn’t it be pretty easy for the coop to just say they should be treated the same? For that matter, I always wonder why Airbnb still exists. Now that they’ve bulldozed all sorts of local regulations with their VC money, why wouldn’t a coop model work better for the actual landlords? Something akin to the MLS for real esta…

The little guy can ride the coattails as long as the behemoth allows it.

The behemoth can get "safety" regulations passed that only the behemoth can satisfy- basically pull the ladder behind them.

Re: The Drivers Cooperative

#279

Post by gruez »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #262
gruez wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>To make money, I would assume, is why they do it? If the only option were a drivers cooperative, then yes they might go for it (although they're still going to be competing against other forms of investment, eg. other stocks). However that's rarely the case, because there's going to be non-cooperatives which don't have workers taking up 50% of the stake. >since investors do it with founder-controlled companies, righ…

They can still believe in the leadership of the project. After all, many investors invest without themselves having a majority stake. If you own 3% of a company, the other 97% might be other investors, or might be some other investors and some worker-owners, you still only own 3%. Not everyone thinks worker-owners are any less capable of making good decisions towards the success of the endeavor than investors, althou…

>After all, many investors invest without themselves having a majority stake. If you own 3% of a company, the other 97% might be other investors, or might be some other investors and some worker-owners, you still only own 3%.

That's not exactly the same. If you invest in a regular company, the other 97% of investors contributed capital, making the company worth more. On the other hand, in a owner coop the 50% (or whatever % share allocated to the workers) is essentially dead weight. There might be some value that the workers add (increased loyalty?), but I doubt whether that has actual value in the context of a ridesharing platform where turnover is high and the workers are more-or-less replaceable.

>But also investors sometimes invest in worker coops because they want to support a worker-owned business in addition to make money, some kind of values-based investing: https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/worker-cooperatives-are-fin...

>Look, all I can say is this is an actual thing that happens, there are hybrid ownership worker coops taht also have investors, it literally exists in reality.

It's hard to infer motivations here, because what they're doing is blending rational investing (eg. maximizing risk adjusted returns) with philanthropy. While it's technically true that worker coops can find "investors", having to rely on the generosity of others isn't exactly a sound business strategy.

Re: The Drivers Cooperative

#280

Post by itake »

I am curious how they tackle safety issues within the coop. Uber, Lyft, and other big players have teams of engineers improving the safety of the platform (e.g. banning duplicate accounts of bad actors, banning people from re-creating accounts, identifying and removing fraud).

I'm skeptical that the team behind the drivers.coop could deliver a fair and scalable safe service for both the riders and drivers.

For example:

1. Uber verifies drivers have face masks before starting shifts with ML.

2. Some/all companies have ML route deviation algorithms to warn the passenger if the driver is not following the correct route.

3. Toxic language detection. Rideshare companies want to flag drivers and passengers that are not communicating nicely.

4. Crash detection. If the phone detects a crash, the ride share company can automatically connect them with emergency operates to ensure everyone is ok.

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