Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/08/10/profile-of-peoples-ride-a-c.html
…
5 Likes
This type of collective is strictly verboten in California. Hence we are stuck with Uber & Lyft, sadly.
1 Like
FTA Uber is a multi-billion dollar company. Imagine what would happen if that money stayed with the drivers.
AFAIK CoOps don’t get that big for two key reasons: money hoarding allows the company to leverage that wealth to create more (lobbying power n whatnot) & CoOps tend to be operated by real humans, ya know, with souls - unlike .com’s they tend to feel bad when they do bad things to their coworkers / don’t operate as a soulless entity.
3 Likes
And that is a bonus if you ask me. No it won’t get big, but hey they might inspire another co-op elsewhere and keep all the profits and spending of said profits localized.
2 Likes
This type of collective is strictly verboten in California.
Can you elaborate? I’m curious as to why.
Sure would be great to have this sort of option here in San Francisco.
1 Like
fortunately this is not always true. yes, Mondragon is an outlier and the Spanish/Basque huge co-operatives are not typically. but not all hope is lost!
4 Likes
Yea!
That’s kinda my default “you’re such a dumbass” comment to my friends that quote (misquote?) Ray-Gun with the 'ol "if they were to increase taxes on revenue over $1M then no one would have any reason to keep working after they got their first $1M!!)
…and I’m like gr8, get out of the way & give someone else a chance for a change!
4 Likes
Sadly, that was sarcasm in my post.
1 Like
Great! I sure hope this model spreads. I’d use it every single time over Lyft if I had the option.
1 Like
Whenever I mention the Mondragon model to the “corporations are people” folks, I get responses that include eye-rolling and “sure, if you don’t mind communism”. When I ask if they think communism is defined by whether or not the executives and board directors actually do work, answers tend to range from “well, obviously” to “you just don’t understand the real world”.
The lack of self-awareness and reliance on paradigms that aren’t understood is mind-boggling.
8 Likes
Reading about Uber for the first time, my immediate thought was that the technology would be perfect for this kind of cooperative venture. I’m glad someone’s finally doing it - I’d feel a lot better about using a service like this than Uber/Lyft. The technology would really lend itself to all sorts of other cooperative ventures, too - which I also hope we’ll see.
5 Likes
Not so amusing. Counting the hours until Uber’s friends in Washington introduce legislation giving them permanent non-monopoly exclusive business rights.
We all know how accepting Franco was to people encouraging communism, don’t we?
5 Likes
The citizens united crowd will find a way to turn this into the Corporation’s Ride.
As far as my experience goes, co-ops tend to be much less futureproof than companies, being usually driven by the goodwill and energy of a restricted number of very active associates that, sooner or later, get tired of doing the quality work for the more passive ones and give up or start a business themselves.
Here i think a lot of co-ops (mainly operating in cleaning services) are more like normal companies in disguise.
So they’re like plants that die of “seasonally” to make way for new growth?
Probably they are more like incubators.
In general you’re probably right, but there are exceptions. REI, Vanguard, Kaiser Permanente and King Arthur Flour are respectively customer, investor, patient and employee owned coops.
2 Likes
The angle of this post and comments seems to be that it’s noteworthy that it’s a co-operative (which is great, all in favor of that), but the real takeaway should be that it took a company as obnoxious, immediately popular, and deep pocketed as Uber to even create the space needed for something like this to exist.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
