Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Uber, Lyft to stop operations in Minneapolis over minimum wage law

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 97 posts

Re: Uber, Lyft to stop operations in Minneapolis over minimum wage law

#61

Post by bogota »

erehweb wrote: post #49
bogota wrote: post #2

“Wage theft” what? It’s very transparent what you are getting paid and what the deal is when you drive for uber or lyft. Argue all you want for thinking that law makers should be setting special wages for specific industries. Personally i think they should stay out of it but man i would be mad as someone living in the city that these services are no longer available.

They have taxis in Minneapolis, no? And ones that have apps available as well, as far as I can tell. Couldn't they just pick up the slack?

Good luck!

Re: Uber, Lyft to stop operations in Minneapolis over minimum wage law

#62

Post by ndriscoll »

thrownaway13371 wrote: post #32
bogota wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. They haven’t been doing that for a few years now. They are just going to leave the market if it becomes unprofitable. I see people complaining all the time about ride prices so the consumer doesn’t want this and im sure the people driving aren’t happy to lose the income as well. Who is winning here?

It's not unprofitable, it's them posturing that they will refuse to lower their profit margins. Do you honestly think they can't afford to pay their employees the bare minimum that literally every other business in the city is paying? No they can easily afford it but if they do pay their workers fairly it sets a precedent that would slightly lower profits the "growth at the expense of everything" mindset.

Presumably those other businesses are able to generate more revenue per employee. Otherwise, they'd go out of business (which happens all the time), as Uber and Lyft are doing here. What do you believe their profit margins are? Uber's latest investor update says theirs was ~2.9% last year, though that number probably requires a decent amount of familiarity with the business to interpret.

I can't imagine investors would be very happy about them choosing to posture instead of making money with their investment if that's what they were doing.

Obviously investors want better margins. Treasuries are paying 4-5% guaranteed, so why invest in Uber to make 3%?

Re: Uber, Lyft to stop operations in Minneapolis over minimum wage law

#67

Post by Simulacra »

bogota wrote: post #43
waveBidder wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it weren't an oligopoly I'd be less inclined to endorse government interference in wage setting. I'd frankly rather the twin cities just spin up their own rideshare marketplace, they have a great carshare system[0], would love to see them expand into rideshare too. [0]: https://eviecarshare.com/

I saw what it took to build both Uber and Lyft. I know that the government will bot be able to reproduce it in any way unless you are fine with a terrible user experience and times where no rides are available

In other words, the corrupt and awful taxi and medallion scam, all over again. I wonder how much the incumbent taxi industry had to do with this. If you want to push up competition, convince the government to force your competition, to pay their employees more than you do.

Re: Uber, Lyft to stop operations in Minneapolis over minimum wage law

#68

Post by Simulacra »

CubsFan1060 wrote: post #33
thrownaway13371 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber and Lyft can easily afford to pay their workers the minimum wage, it would however hurt their record profits and set a precedence that they would need to pay a living wage across all cities. Amazingly all other businesses in this city are already able to afford the minimum wage. This is a perfect example of a company tossing some of the lowest income members of society literally to the street rather than pay the…

Can you help me out with the money here? I was curious, so I went and looked. https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-det... It looks like they made approximately 1.4 billion, with a gross bookings of around 37.5 billion. That would _seem_ to mean that drivers would get an increase of approximately 3% of the full booking price if Uber was a nonprofit? Best I could find is that there are about 5.4 mil…

A lot of people assume that just because a company has a lot of money that they can freely give away that money to their employees. We've seen this before, Starbucks for example, billion dollar company they have plenty of money to give their employees. No one really takes into account all of the expenses, and what that actually would look like.

Re: Uber, Lyft to stop operations in Minneapolis over minimum wage law

#69

Post by sabarn01 »

toss1 wrote: post #44
cowboyscott wrote: post #7

I suggest reading the report by the Minnesota Department of Labor [0]. Some interesting pulls from the summary: > Census data and the driver survey indicate the majority of Minnesota TNC drivers are male immigrants and predominantly Black or African American non-Hispanic workers with less than a four-year college degree; many live in low-income households (up to 200% of the federal poverty level) and, relative to all…

>> are disproportionately reliant on public assistance. Whenever workers for a company are disproportionately reliant on public assistance, it means that the management has figured out a scam to get rest of the taxpayers to subsidize their business. The taxpayers make up the difference between what is paid vs a living wage which would be required for those workers to sustainably work for the corp, and the management/…

What is the other option. Welfare exists as is and is just part of the social services offered by the government. For a lot of poor people there isn't a job that will offer them a living wage because they don't have skills yet to demand that. Bad jobs are ways to show that you have the skills to be on time come in everyday ect. Bad jobs allow people to build skills at low risk to the employer so they can demand higher wages over time.

Not everyone can work a full time job and the government shouldn't get in peoples way of earning money however they see fit.

Re: Uber, Lyft to stop operations in Minneapolis over minimum wage law

#70

Post by QuercusMax »

sabarn01 wrote: post #69
toss1 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> are disproportionately reliant on public assistance. Whenever workers for a company are disproportionately reliant on public assistance, it means that the management has figured out a scam to get rest of the taxpayers to subsidize their business. The taxpayers make up the difference between what is paid vs a living wage which would be required for those workers to sustainably work for the corp, and the management/…

What is the other option. Welfare exists as is and is just part of the social services offered by the government. For a lot of poor people there isn't a job that will offer them a living wage because they don't have skills yet to demand that. Bad jobs are ways to show that you have the skills to be on time come in everyday ect. Bad jobs allow people to build skills at low risk to the employer so they can demand highe…

Companies like Walmart and McDonald's take advantage of government assistance by not paying their employees enough to live on. And before you say that only teenagers should be working these minimum wage jobs - there aren't enough teens to work these jobs, especially during school hours. If you're employing people, you need to pay them enough - and if they can't live on the wages you pay, the company should foot the bill for the welfare, not the rest of the economy.
Post reply on HN