NYC’s driver-owned Uber alternative

Platform cooperativism needs interoperability, though.

New Yorkers have a new ridehailing alternative to Uber: The Drivers Cooperative is a driver-owned, app-based ride-hailing service that pays drivers more, charges riders less, and pays out any profits to driver-owners as periodic dividends.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/28/technology/nyc-uber-lyft-the-drivers-cooperative.html

Platform cooperativism is a powerful antidote to app-based gig work: a way to provide customers with the convenience that made app-based services so popular while putting workers in control of their days, schedules and working conditions.

It’s particularly buoying to see a platform co-op challenge Uber, a company that started as a way to funnel Saudi royals’ billions into a bid to dismantle public transit and worker protections in a single fell swoop.

Uber is especially vulnerable. It’s losing billions of dollars, and it had to pay a group of suckers $400m to relieve it of its failed, $25b self-driving car unit whose product couldn’t manage a single mile on its own.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/16/ring-ring-lapd-calling/#uber-unter

Uber’s main project has always been regulatory, not technological: that’s why it…