A Worker-Owned Cooperative Tries to Compete With Uber and Lyft
About 2,500 drivers in New York are organizing to create what they say is a better deal for drivers than what the ride-hailing giants offer.
Members of the Drivers Cooperative in Queens. The group intends to take a smaller commission than Uber or Lyft and charge riders a lower fare.Credit.Adam Whyte for The New York Times
May 28, 2021Updated 2:35 p.m. ET
For years, Uber and other ride-hailing companies offered the promise of entrepreneurship to drivers. Drivers who were eager to set their own schedules signed up in droves, propelling the gig economy into a multibillion-dollar industry.
Revenge: Spectrum Workers on Strike Build Their Own ISP
Photo: Drew Angerer (Getty Images)
If, for any number of reasons, you’d like to burn telecoms to the ground and build a new internet service provider on their smoldering remains, good news for you. New York City Spectrum workers, who’ve weathered an anguishing four-year strike, have built their own internet service provider. If the city throws its support behind it, People’s Choice Communications could liberate New Yorkers from cable gangsters once and for all.
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The city itself is almost constantly fighting Spectrum. With its rise to dominance in New York, Gov. Andrew
It’s not necessarily because of low barriers to entry. In fact, over the past decade the barriers became unbelievably high, as policymakers and predatory lenders spent years artificially inflating the price of a taxi cab medallion the city permit required to own a yellow cab pushing many taxi drivers into spiraling debts that have led to multiple taxi drivers committing suicide.
But despite all that, the barriers are even more prohibitive in many other sectors, pushing immigrants into situations where they become vulnerable to all manner of exploitation, be it taxi medallion debt to ride hailing platform companies taking 25-30 percent of their revenues.