If you were at any of the city council meetings where this topic was brought up it was a circus show with people repeating 'boston is a union town' and grilling waymo execs.
Their rationale is that it should be more like hiring a contractor for your house, a platform wouldn't get a cut of the cost of your grass cutter so why should drivers be any different?
So far I haven't had any issues, although I did hear of some problems and controversies they have.
If you're interested, next time you take a car, ask the driver what their end is - you may be surprised how little of the fare they actually take home. That share will only decrease unless they all get on one side of a table.
The barrier of entry to get new non-union drivers for Lyft and Uber is very low. If a strike does happen I can't imagine it would be hard for them to fairly quickly get new drivers, especially with the possibility of higher fairs due to high demand while it is sorted out. I have to imagine they would be able to get drivers far faster than most other situations with strikes.
I wonder if Uber and Lyft would even try to partner with gocurb or another app to funnel riders directly to taxies.
Not saying a union is a bad thing, I just wonder in this particular case how well it is realistically going to work out. Guess we will see.
It is not mentioned in "Fighting Traffic", which would be quite an oversight!
But when they get into the business of slowing down technology adoption to protect workers, that's when they get into the territory of giving unions a bad name. Getting together to lobby the government to make systemic changes to help displaced workers would be great, but it seems in this case they are trying to get government to just ban technology that replaces them.
When I do take Uber and Lyft rides, I ask the drivers how much they're getting paid, and the amounts they tell me are often 30% to 60% less than what I paid, which is a bit shocking to me.
At some point, Uber and Lyft stopped being service providers that charged riders a fee for value provided. They have become market makers that squeeze as much trading profit as possible by arbitraging the prices riders are willing to pay and the rates drivers are willing to accept. I imagine they are capturing most of the value in each ride today.
I'm not surprised about the ride-share driver union.
In my city, Zoox are already rolling out driverless taxi services, and the vehicles they are using are completely autonomous.
I don't see either American labor or American government being anywhere near strong enough or capable enough to facilitate a soft landing.
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/do-us-ports-need-more...
Is that true?
You might have people that want to drive taxis but they would still have to get used to the streets, how the app works etc. etc. which can significantly degrade service quality.
They should just learn to code! /s
> I don't see either American labor or American government being anywhere near strong enough or capable enough to facilitate a soft landing.
More seriously, I agree with this, but the problems are going to extend way beyond just transportation workers.
These are problems we could theoretically find solutions for, but we're headed into it at warp speed with an already absolutely broken political system and massive levels of wealth inequality.
I find it far more likely that the solution to this all ends up being chaos and bloodshed rather than properly managed preventive policy changes.
I would consider the emputus more on companies to not roll out new technology in a way that harms workers.
In the article it mentions that this is a union of 70,000 independent contractors. I imagine that it would be very bad for Uber if they all decided not to drive simultaneously.
With collective organization, the union has a better chance to coordinate strikes and other collective action, as well as bargain for pay collectively rather than in a one to many relationship.
I don’t really blame the drivers for trying, I just think it’s probably not a viable long-term career, unfortunately.
[1] except of course if you’re Panera, coincidentally owned by a Newsom friend/donor. Good ol’ Bake-bread-on-premises exception!
> I don't see either American labor or American government being anywhere near strong enough or capable enough to facilitate a soft landing.
Certainly not yet, but a resolution will present itself. The quality of which is to be determined of course.
(not advocating either way, simply enumerating the risk model; I am privileged that my day job is to get paid to think like a threat actor across various verticals and model accordingly)
[1] https://usafacts.org/answers/how-many-troops-are-in-the-us-m...
But anyway, even though Uber might lose some sales in the short term while they build up more drivers, if the union’s demands would make the rides barely profitable (or where Uber loses money) then that’s not really an actual loss.
Not to mention it’s the drivers who still pay depreciation and insurance cost of their cars whether or not they drive.
Similar to another commenter I don’t really care or have a dog in this race, I’m just commenting on the actors and what their relative advantages are.
I personally don't care about this as long as the costs aren't passed on to me.
So what? Uber operates all over the world, losing some revenue (maybe not even profit) in one region is a loss they can eat. A Taxi company couldn't eat this kind of loss and would be forced to negotiate. Uber though? They can tough it out if it's advantageous to them.
This is the inevitable result of replacing local taxi monopolies or cartels with a multinational "tech" duopoly.
The future, boot, face, forever, etc.
The only few that should benefit are the owners. If a few workers try to benefit, they're greedy bastards who would be pounded down.
There's probably a big opportunity in the startup world for building businesses that have an end goal. Like a TV show that has a whole story to tell and then stops... a business that has an entire development plan which finishes and at the end you have a stable business that stops adding features, cuts development costs to maintenance, and just exists.
Like I don't need my taxi app to change, we're good, you can just be done making new stuff.
I don't think they need to burn them down, punctured tires would probably be enough.
Why is there prostitution?
Why are slaves doing work for their masters?
Why are children going through our garbage in some distant country, if they hardly earn enough to eat?
That puts the barrier to entry on the same level as grocery store workers. Granted, those too can successfully unionize; I agree that such strikes are only toothless when unemployment is high.
It isn't like other jobs that have resumes and (possibly) long interview processes.
From what I can find we are talking a few days without talking to anyone and you are driving. Throw in Uber and Lyft doing an advertising campaign with incentives to start driving, I don't see any reason they could not have a potential large amount of drivers fairly quickly.
Maybe it won't be at ideal hours, maybe it will still be hit or miss, but there are a lot of drivers out there. Just due to the very nature of this being gig work.
All they really need to just ignore the union's demands is to be able to sign up enough drivers to out last the members not making money. Getting used to driving the streets and everything is up to the drivers, not uber or lyft. I am just reluctant to think it will actually work and the drivers won't cave. Trying to pass laws would be a more concrete fix.
Some of these workers might find that the only gig that they can rely on is ride share for various reasons.
But humanity's resources are controlled by few, and they want more exploitation, enshitification and ads, not abundant energy.
If you work with workers so that they will have a safe landing through a just transition, such that longshoreman experienced when the cargo container revolutionized shipping [3] [4], you might get worker buy in. If you say you will with no evidence you will follow through, you will not get buy in, and whatever is the downstream impact of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of workers becoming redundant rapidly without a safety net.
Despite hope not being a strategy, as an observer, I hope that policymakers make a choice that leads to a net favorable outcome. If they do not, that is a choice.
[1] Is long-haul trucking really facing a driver shortage? - https://www.marketplace.org/story/2024/11/20/is-long-haul-tr... - November 20th, 2024
[2] Impacts of Alternative Compensation Methods on Truck Driver Retention and Safety Performance - https://www.nationalacademies.org/projects/TRB-CAAS-22-01 - 2024
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box_(Levinson_book)
[4] Arthur Donovan (1999) Longshoremen and mechanization, Journal for Maritime Research, 1:1, 66-75, DOI: 10.1080/21533369.1999.9668300 https://doi.org/10.1080/21533369.1999.9668300
I do hope that unsupervised comes soon though. The tech is there, or at least far enough that I consider it better than my own driving. The hurdle is regulatory now.
Risk Assessment and Threat Modeling for safe autonomous driving technology - https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.02231 | https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2505.02231
Autonomous Vehicle Security: A Deep Dive into Threat Modeling - https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.15348 | https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2412.15348
Banning payday loans tends to shift borrowers to worse forms of credit.
One imagines worsening the economics of ride share jobs will do the same.
Yours is a pretty normal idea for nearly any business before 100 years ago, plus still the way all small businesses with 1 owner generally work (they call it a “Lifestyle business” today). But any public company that just said “Yeah we basically just print $400 million in profit every year, and have no plans to grow that, nor to change anything besides doing maintenance” gets the kind of treatment Southwest just did: taken over by the enshittification engineers and destroyed. Everything must have infinite growth!!
Personal agents will search every app for the lowest fare, when in the past the apps had a moat due to the economic frictions involved in sampling more than one app. Uber is also ripe for vibe coding.
Won't be much consolation to drivers as they'll get automated soon after probably.
I don't think all software companies are in imminent danger but Uber does seem particularly vulnerable.
Do you have a source for any of this beyond "a corporate spokesmouth said so"?