Worker-Owned Apps Are Trying to Fix the Gig Economy | Hacker News Reader

Worker-Owned Apps Are Trying to Fix the Gig Economy

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210 pointsrmbryan145 comments

Don't forget what happened to Walnut when it priced its moving services for fairness and equity: https://medium.com/@nickbkim/why-were-closing-walnut-a452225...

Everyone wants fairness and equity until the time comes for each to pay for it.

I'm saying this in a disappointed tone as I really would like platform cooperatives to work but they're going to fail to compete in a relatively open market of a capitalist society. Also, everyone working in IT for these platforms becomes the exploited. It's inverted exploitation. Programmer: you're being paid less than what you'd make in a free market. If you're not getting your flat cleaned twice a week as a member of this cooperative, you're doing it wrong. You, my friend, are being taken to the proverbial cleaners.

There's more to life then money. Being able to provide others with a fair and better platform would make me accept a paycut.

It's easy to give up what you don't have. A web dev in Sweden has a social safety net to maintain a quality of life that is unobtainable in the U.S. without earning as much as possible. It is never at someone else's loss but at the discretion of managers based on the value each gives to the organization.

I'm sorry, I don't really follow your comment.

> It is never at someone else's loss but at the discretion of managers based on the value each gives to the organization

Can you expand on this?

I'm not sure I understand how IT workers would be exploited?

2010–2012 Instagram launches on the iPhone and grows to 13 employees and to 30 million users (closing at $50 million at a $500 million valuation). It eventually gets acquired by Facebook in 2012.

Seems like if you scaled like that you could still pay devs pretty well with minimal costs per transactions.

"exploited" is a subjective judgement that means some earns less than the speaker thinks they deserve.

Flat cleaners and programmers have different notions of how much each deserves.

Travis K is a billionaire. Statistically, almost everyone agrees that most of his wealth should be distributed to Uber workers. There is much less consensus regarding how much of consumers' money should be likewise distributed.

I couldn't disagree more.

Walnut is an example of what happens when amateurs move into an industry without understanding the fundamentals or doing sufficient dillagence.

There is no reason that Co-op workers and IT can't be paid market rates.

The problem is that they are already paid market rates. The claim is that market rates are not fair.

Yeah exactly, anyone can make a good expensive product. It takes true require entrepreneurial skill(= the ability to screw over your employees as much as possible) to deliver a product that everyone hates but buys anyways.

Despite the loaded exploitation rhetoric in the article, if competitors can come into the market that is better for the workers, that’s great. And if it raises the standards for the privately owned apps, that’s even better. This seems like a win all around.

exploration =?> exploitation

Yes. Edited.

what if it makes it impossible for the "privately owned" apps to compete and wipes them out completely?

Why would that be a problem?

Then that is the best case scenario. Let the exploitative founders and VCs test the market and find fit...then let the workers organize and steal their lunch.

An economist would say that customers and workers are capturing most of the value of the transaction, so that would be close to optimal.

Then we might have found a way to solve most of humanity's problems!

Job done

That is as much of a problem in itself as co-ops or literal cottage industries not being competitive with dedicated workforces. Sucks to be them but not a true problem to the economy overall.

If they can't compete with their advantages maybe they shouldn't be in that business. Just being able to do something efficiently isn't an abuse.

Net gain for humanity

Let me rephrase that question in terms of software -- what happens if someone develops an Open Source product that works better than the proprietary alternative, and the proprietary alternatives get wiped out entirely?

The short answer is that for-profit, privatized entities should not be privileged in competition. Community owned solutions, non-profit solutions, naturally occurring public alternatives to products, worker-owned and volunteer-maintained solutions, and so on -- these efforts are no less legitimate than a traditional Capitalist solution. If they produce better results than a VC-backed or privatized product, then they deserve to win.

In my mind, the difference between a free market and Capitalism is that a free market is OK with Capitalists losing sometimes. It's good for businesses to compete not only with each other, but also with forces and coalitions outside of traditional markets.

And worker-owned businesses aren't even that radical of an idea -- they're just a different way to manage the business and distribute profits. Open Source and nonprofits are much farther outside of traditional Capitalist markets than a worker-owned business is.

I'm all for efforts like this.

All new businesses start out as purely worker-owned. Some of them just find it convenient to sell shares of the business (equity) in exchange for capital, but this need not apply to everyone. Indeed, the typical "app"-driven business has little reason to take any outside capital at all.

> what happens if someone develops an Open Source product that works better than the proprietary alternative, and the proprietary alternatives get wiped out entirely?

Well, we know what happens. Consider the compiler business. In the 80's, compilers cost real money. Today, compilers are free and are far better.

Although in the 80's I once counted 30 independent C compiler vendors. Those companies all dwindled away one by one.

Yeah - it would be a logical extension of disrupting gatekeepers in an efficient market. Also kind of obvious in retrospect when gig-workers or contractors require their own tools that they would be in a good position to subsitute for the rest of the company "chain". That makes them mobile and we already saw "multiapp" gig workers.

Of course the hard part is that owing to mindshare these markets tend strongly towards winner takes most.

To add some data to the "exploitation" argument, consider this:

“Imagine developing a company specifically to take advantage of people’s ignorance of how expensive it really is to drive their own car. What would this company look like?“

(the answer is of course that it would look like very much like Uber or any other ridesharing company)

https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2017/11/22/mr-money-mustache...

This seems like a fault by the individual being 'exploited'. I don't think it is the job of a corporation to run an a cost-benefit analysis tailored for watch individual. There is also no obligation to continue driving, so if the drivers cost-benefit isn't what they thought they can always find something else

Yes, but... you can be sure there's a business plan lying around somewhere at Uber that accounts for the fact that some % of drivers won't do the math...

We routinely make known scams illegal despite fact that the "fault" lies in the individual being scammed. Not saying Uber is a scam, but "victims should know better" isn't a valid defense of it.

Time and resources to comparison shop (in a broad sense) being neither of them infinite, the more we can assure certain definitely- or probably-bad options are absent from the market, the better the market will function.

Pro-healthy-and-effective-markets and absolutist pro-liberty or laissez-faire stances aren't always aligned.

Right, and there must be competitors to compare with. This is why a federal job guarantee makes sense.

This is precisely the way a market for lemons works. Scumbags like you thinking it's ok to prey on the less knowledgeable human beings we live with.

Not one wants to live in a society where your every moment must be dominated by one cost-benefit analysis or another. There is an assumption, I would argue, in the everyday notion that society exists for the common good, that our lives not be either 100% optimized or, otherwise, exploited for profit by some other optimizer.

There is a sense in which being induced to consider whether your life is efficient or not is virtuous, of course. Since much of what we use every day is common resource, rather than private resource, we don't want people to be completely careless.

But things don't shake out fairly in the real world. The people who are most often punished for failing to optimize are not, by any stretch, the most profligate resource consumers. And yet no one is particularly concerned about whether the lifestyles of the wealthy are completely optimal or whether they could be making more rational use of their resources.

Even this state of affairs could be tolerable except that only a clown would suggest the distribution of resources we see now is one that aligns with what people deserve. For the most part, its the vagueries of history which have decided who gets to live without too much care for optimization and who must be completely rational or get fucked.

> Not one wants to live in a society where your every moment must be dominated by one cost-benefit analysis or another.

Except we all do, regardless of how society is organized. For example, is that luscious chocolate torte's taste worth the detriment to one's health? Is driving a little faster worth the extra risk of getting a ticket? Should I buy or rent? Should I buy the expensive shoes or the knockoffs? Should I buy it now at the higher price or wait till I get home and order it online for cheaper?

To some extent what you describe is paradigmatic - the product of a particular set of circumstances (one might even say an ideology, if they were of that frame of mind).

Its not inherent to the human condition. Imagine, either as a practical possibility, or an as yet manifested, potentially utopian ideal, where your time wasn't being metered out by any immediate demands and you moved through life on the basis of purely aesthetic concerns. Think of the supposed hunter-gatherers who lived in times of abundance. Only a bit of time was given each day to the dumb gods of survival. The rest of the time could be used for leisure - an idea almost dead in contemporary life (as your comment demonstrates).

In fact, just a few days ago, Paul Graham was posting about one important aspect of genius: an impractical (say aesthetically motivated) obsession unconnected to (though perhaps restrained by) practical concerns. Almost every human has some purely aesthetic desires which they would like to act on in the portion of their life which they can carve out from practicalities of survival.

I see the social contract or whatever you'd like to call it (if the name contract offends) as an attempt to carve out some portion, hopefully not too meager, of our lives out for just such living, for every human.

Its only an immediate condition of modernity, which I'd attribute vaguely to the vague "liberal" zeitgeist, which makes that idea seem alien to all but the wealthiest.

Its certainly true that we could rationalize our every moment but in almost any reasonable account a person who wanted to do that or who tried would be considered mentally ill and certainly unhappy. Its inhuman. Its not what we should want.

When I spend time with my two year old son I'm not fucking filling in a god-damned column in some great spreadsheet in the sky, is what I'm saying. That should be the privilege of every person.

> Its not inherent to the human condition.

It is. Should you give up hunting that mastondon and instead look for easier and less risky prey?

> When I spend time with my two year old son I'm not fucking filling in a god-damned column in some great spreadsheet in the sky

You are, whether you consciously realize it or not. You are always making cost-benefit choices. Watch TV or read a book. Play with kid or have a beer with buddies. Etc.

I think you are conflating two distinct things, one of which is an incontrovertible reality and the other not. Its certainly the case that in a sense we are always making choices which you could apply a cost benefit analysis to (although and as an aside, there is no universally agreed upon system for making such analyses, so what this means is unclear).

What isn't necessarily true is that any particular person at any particular time is performing, even subconsciously, a cost benefit analysis.

What I'm trying to get across is that it is the preference of the vast majority of human beings to not be so performing all the time.

If you really must think of the spreadsheet, think of it this way: most people prefer for most of their decisions to be made ahead of time and for the circumstances of life, if at all possible, the change infrequently enough that they don't need to go back to the spreadsheet every single minute of their lives.

If you find that people react negatively to modernity, it might be because the liberal fantasy is that we're all just fucking going crazy on our spreadsheets all of the time (unless we're rich, then we pay someone else to think about our spreadsheets all the time and we live on the margins, as irrational and happy as pigs in the mud).

> What isn't necessarily true is that any particular person at any particular time is performing, even subconsciously, a cost benefit analysis.

Every time a person makes a decision, they are doing a cost benefit analysis, regardless of whether they are aware of it or not.

> What I'm trying to get across is that it is the preference of the vast majority of human beings to not be so performing all the time.

It is true that many people (including me) prefer to "wing" decisions because they don't want to expend effort on it. But that itself is yet another cost-benefit decision.

I'll jump in here: we are the process and product of evolution so we must be doing cost benefit analysis all the time. It's almost entirely unconscious (or automatic if you prefer) but it's got to be happening (or we would have been out-adapted and failed to exist in the first place.)

I think you, GP and WalterBright are talking past each other. Sure, cost-benefit seems to be ingrained deeply into the structure of our minds; I'd go as far as to say it's also an important part of rational thinking in the abstract. But GP isn't talking about that.

GP is talking about being forced to do cost-benefit analyses on a conscious and even instinctive levels all the time, by our economy and our society. GP is talking about the desire to not have to do that, and to instead be able to enjoy life without constantly worrying that anything but close-to-optimal decision will be disastrous in short or long-term. The dream of being able to relax, to be able to dive deep into something that interests you for couple of weeks, without risking sacrificing your kid's whole future in the process.

Upthread, I believe GP was also talking about what I call the competitive vs. cooperative nature of society. Our society is way too competitive for my taste, and it's what I believe is driving this cost/benefit craze.

My take is the same. And to add to it, being constantly analyzing every aspect of one's life leads to loss of creativity, spontaneity and joy. I understand we do cost benefit analysis when we make serious choices or even for all choices but as nathan_compton points out, we don't need to do that every single time. And to further add to it, being an artist in this day and age is a f-ing privilege because only rich people can afford it. There are lots of artists who are not rich but they are stressed out and find various jobs to make ends meet, specifically very modest ends, food and shelter.

> we don't need to do that every single time.

You cannot help but do it every single time. Even when you choose what TV channel to watch. If you conscious mind doesn't do it, your subconscious will.

Making good cost/benefit decisions is how poor people move up financially, and making bad ones is how the rich become not-so-rich. (Like David Cassidy, who spent his wealth on drugs and parties and one day woke up jobless, friendless, and money-less. A similar story happened to Will Smith, though he managed to turn his life around, make better decisions, and regained his wealth.)

I'm not here to rag on good cost benefit analysis. Obviously resources are finite and we need to, both individually, and as a species or a moral collective or whatever, make somewhat rational use of the resources.

What I am trying, but apparently failing, to get across, is that optimizing a cost benefit analysis is not the primary mode of human existence. It may be, in some uselessly wide tautological sense, an inevitable aspect of it, but it doesn't characterize the human experience in toto. Most human beings do plenty of things which they don't consciously evaluate in such bloodless terms and, indeed, because there is no universal notion of cost or benefit, its unclear what your imaginary perfect analyzer would be up to in the first place.

Thus, if we are to preserve as valid the vast majority of human activities, we must deny the idea that literally every moment needs to be consciously optimized and embrace the counter-notion: that society be organized in such a way that we can sometimes, perhaps as often as possible, chill the fuck out.

> What I am trying, but apparently failing, to get across, is that optimizing a cost benefit analysis is not the primary mode of human existence.

I get what you're saying, but, with respect, I think you're wrong about that.

> It may be, in some uselessly wide tautological sense, an inevitable aspect of it,

As far as scientific consensus goes, I think it's pretty common to encounter the belief that life is "just" biological machinery and, ergo, evolution is a chemical tautology.

> but it doesn't characterize the human experience in toto.

But here it seems to me that you're verging into mysticism, which personally I don't mind but you have to call it out.

> Most human beings do plenty of things which they don't consciously evaluate in such bloodless terms

Yes, I agree, and in fact it seems to me to be a very recent, even modern, thing that people are doing that at all. I mean, accounting only began around 5k years ago, eh? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform )

> there is no universal notion of cost or benefit, its unclear what your imaginary perfect analyzer would be up to in the first place.

There is a universal notion, but it's self-referential: success at replication.

Again, this is a IRL chemical tautology: success at replication engenders new conditions that then bring about changes in the (virtual) fitness landscape engendering new adaptation. (E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event )

Thus the universal notion of benefit is a verb not a noun, further, it's a self-defining "emergent" notion.

Evolution and meta-evolution occur at the same time, are the same process.

From this POV, it's absolutely fascinating (IMO) that this process created self-aware individuals with intelligence that can, e.g. look at the night sky and see stars in all their celestial glory (as contrasted to mere tiny lights on a fixed fabric.)

> Thus, if we are to preserve as valid the vast majority of human activities...

(Just to mention in passing, I don't think we can evaluate the validity of human activity en mass for at least a few hundred million years or so. If we talking apes can't survive longer than the unintelligent dinosaurs I don't think any of our civilization(s) can be considered valid.)

...we must deny the idea that literally every moment needs to be consciously optimized...

(Again, I'm not saying that, and I don't think WalterBright meant that either, but it's not interesting IMO)

...and embrace the counter-notion: that society be organized in such a way that we can sometimes, perhaps as often as possible, chill the fuck out.

Now, here, you are talking my language friend! I mentioned elsewhere in the thread that I'm a fan of Bucky Fuller, in part because he basically said that our tech can support us with a high standard of living w/o "disadvantaging anyone" and we should be able to retire at 25 (etc.)

So, yeah, slack off. :-)

That's the other interesting question, IMO: is the evolution of intelligence the end of evolution or a change of form? (And this Q is complicated by the fact that intelligence is ambient (cf. M. Levin's work.))

I mean, what if we all slack off ("Let the robots do the work and we'll take their pay.") and get enslaved by Klingons or degenerate into blobs?

I agree that we should not be dangling appealing but actually disastrous choices in front of people, particularly if they aren’t educated enough, or aren’t provided enough information up-front in order to make an educated decision.

This is true in everything from investment opportunities (SEC with Registered Securities, and the higher bar for selling to unaccredited investors), to mortgages ($0 down with no income verification and a teaser adjustable rate), to food or drug safety (you don’t have to know how to check that food or drugs are safe at the grocery store or pharmacy) and generally you want it to be true of work opportunities as well — not that this is necessarily going to be the best use of your time, but that you know at least it should be safe and at least minimally profitable.

Personally I think many drivers make very good money on Uber, and also on the food delivery apps, in particular for how those apps fit their lifestyle and their preferences for when/how they want to work.

When it gets to be a bridge too far is if you exceed the baseline minima, and start telling people their preferences for how they want to work are wrong, or assuming everyone who disagrees with you just doesn’t know any better.

If you cede all your decisions to someone else who presumably knows your best interests, you become what's called a slave.

If you have a narrow optimum that's dragging your whole cost/benefit analysis towards it, and that optimum is externally created and controlled, you too become what's called a slave. A good example is wage slavery.

But perhaps this isn't about the fact that we're optimizers under pressure. Maybe it's better viewed as a problem with the shape of the optimization space. It looks vastly different for rich vs. regular people - the slopes are gentler when you have the means, so you don't have to worry so much about falling into local minima you can't ever escape from.

Richard Montanez went from janitor to executive at PepsiCo.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/27/a-janitor-invented-flamin-ho...

Survivorship bias.

Sure, I get it. I'm a Bucky Fuller fanboy and I'm always reminding people about how he calculated that we have the technology to provide for everyone already and it's time to repent, quit your job, and slack off.

But if you believe in evolution then WalterBright pretty much has to be right, from first principles.

The interesting thing is that things like daydreaming must be adaptive.

- - - -

The really mind-blowing thing is that if you take Michael Levin's work seriously ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698 ) you have to confront the idea that living tissue thinks.

Does intelligence actually grant an escape from the evolutionary "Wheel of Karma" or just reify the forms that the drive to endure takes on?

Are we engines of terrible purpose or the art of Solaris?

This isn't really the implication of evolutionary theory. We need to do enough cost-benefit analysis to reproduce most of the time and (more broadly speaking) so that our genes, which may be in other organisms, reproduce. Some of that cost benefit analysis can be "frozen out" of our cognitive processes (for instance, a tree isn't doing much cost benefit analysis - much if its behavior is fixed and yet it survives).

There is no evolutionary reason to believe that literally all your brain power is devoted to cost benefit analysis, and even if that were the case, under the presumption that we have some self-determination, it wouldn't tell us much about whether its morally good or not or aesthetically pleasing or whatever criteria we might use.

> There is no evolutionary reason to believe that literally all your brain power is devoted to cost benefit analysis

The brain uses something like 1/5th of the oxygen you take in, what is it doing with all that?

If we use the phrase "cost benefit analysis" in a general sense (rather than the specific activity [1]) for coming up with the "best" thing to do then I think it's practically tautological that your brain is a gland for just that.

> if that were the case, under the presumption that we have some self-determination, it wouldn't tell us much about whether its morally good or not or aesthetically pleasing or whatever criteria we might use.

From what might be called an "evolutionary fundamentalist" POV "self-determination" is also something your CBA-gland does to get your genes into the future and (perhaps paradoxically) you don't get a choice about using it to maximize your expected future benefit.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost%E2%80%93benefit_analysis

I'm guessing you love the way healthcare currently works in US. So many choices! Who doesn't love a combinatorial explosion?

Can I return my car for a refund if I decide I don't want to drive for Uber anymore?

Great article from the 'Stache. It seems like the people who benefit most from driving are those that lack the necessary documentation to get a "real job" - i.e. immigrants. If that's the target audience for Uber and Lyft's "clients" (because they are _not_ employees, right?), well, I find that somewhat immoral. I dunno. When I was between jobs I worked Postmates and Caviar (and Amazon Flex, until I was "fired by an algorithm" (no joke!) to make rent, and it was a modest success. I only ended up using the platforms for 2-3 months max, and starting off, I really enjoyed being the delivery driver and offering excellent customer service. I would go out of my way to ensure I grabbed extra napkins, utensils, sauces, etc. to go the extra mile, and when the tip reflected that, I was elated - the lizard parts of my brain that respond to video game achievements lit up - and I mentally competed myself to be better, faster, and more efficient. And this part of the brain, like the gambler's, forgets the bad times and cherishes only the good times. But I won't forget having to pace around in a pitch-black cul-de-sac, looking for a mysterious stranger who won't answer their phone, thinking that five minutes more, and these Greek fries are mine until...a college kid came out with a disposition reflecting both "hey bro" and "sorry bro" and we did the awkward exchange of "here's your food" and "here's me thanking you for it". Now I have a boring office job, and I tend to cook for myself.

If your narrative was true, why wouldn’t drivers quit in droves?

My retired dad drives an Uber. He built a spreadsheet and did the math on car deterioration and gas costs and is happy with the result. If Uber is exploiting anything, it’s idle labor.

I don’t own any Uber or Lyft stock. I think worker owned apps could potentially hurt Ubers market share if the drivers collectively push them and prices are at least 20% cheaper or faster.

Retired. Did the math. Somehow doesn't strike me as the average Uber driver.

It's trivial for Uber to "do the math" based on some simple factors drivers could plug into the app, and then they could show what the driver is actually earning after gas, maintenance, and depreciation. Writing a spreadsheet and figuring out all that yourself is difficult to get right and requires a fair amount of mathematical and technical knowledge.

Mr. Money Mustache's argument is that it would be trivial for Uber and Lyft to "do the math" for them, but they won't because then drivers will realize just how little they're making.

> Retired. Did the math. Somehow doesn't strike me as the average Uber driver.

I often explain to people who duck learning math, who don't think it is relevant, etc., that being inept at math is a strong predictor of being poor. None want to hear that, but what can I do?

Are you sure that being poor isn't a strong predictor of being bad at math?

Perhaps, but rejecting math instruction as being "irrelevant", "boring", "not cool", is a choice.

My sister was teaching math. One student asked why they even needed to learn that stuff. She said "how will you ever know if you're getting ripped off?". The kid considered that for a moment and started paying attention.

I don't think anecdata is relevant for Uber, since their pricing/payment is not uniform.

Especially considering gas prices vary by $2 a gallon sometimes within a mile where I live. Not to mention everything else that's absolutely different uber driver to uber driver.

Did your dad buy a car for Uber?

The question is whether that is economically rational. Once you are stuck paying for a car, Uber looks a lot better going forward.

You can be cash-flow positive driving Uber, but still lose money overall. Depreciation can be sneaky because you don't pay it until you switch vehicles, and even when it comes time to pay it, the costs are bundled up into the next vehicle loan you get. Maintenance is the same way.

Uber exploits the fact that people mistakenly believe cash flow is profit.

I also wonder if your father purchased commercial insurance. That stuff is expensive, and not having it is like buying an exploding lottery ticket. If he's ever in an accident (regardless of whether he was getting paid or not) and his insurance discovers that he drove for Uber without the appropriate coverage, the claim could be denied.

Uber also exploits the fact that their drivers can get away with not being adequately insured.

Uber covers insurance. https://www.uber.com/us/en/drive/insurance/

It’s not all hard to extrapolate mileage depreciation based on car prices.

I feel like these laws are coming from well meaning people who don’t actually represent anyone earning money driving for Uber.

Why are we not seeing driver strikes driving these changes?

Uber covers you while your driving, that does not prevent insurance companies from denying claims or dropping coverage on former or current Uber drivers because they don't have commercial insurance on their now-commercial vehicle.

If you're ever in an accident while not driving for Uber, the insurance company will ask you if you've ever used this car to drive for a ride-sharing service. This could be grounds to void your policy. And Uber will not cover you in this situation.

https://www.reddit.com/r/uberdrivers/comments/44vuoa/insuran...

It’s largely a solved problem. My insurer USAA has a ride-share add-on that costs an additional $10 a month.

Before you call an enormous group of people ignorant, you might want to run your numbers again.

These kind of analysis all seems to make the same mistake. They use an average, linear depreciation of the value of the vehicle and they continue that depreciation into infinity. But the fact is, the depreciation curve is effectively flat as you get to zero. And the maintenance does not increase into infinity either.

After a vehicle has a few hundred thousand miles on it, the resale value is effectively the scrap value of the metal in it. Putting another 100k miles will not make it negative. And there are only so many parts to replace in a vehicle as far as maintenance goes.

You are correct that running a car into the ground is the way to make money as a taxi service. There's a reason used taxis have like 500,000+ miles on them. However, to drive for Uber, you have to have a car newer than 10 years old

This means, you're going to take the bulk of the depreciation hit on a car. We can debate whether driving ten, 9-year old cars for a year each results in less depreciation than a single new car driven for ten years. But either way, you can't drive a car into the ground using Uber like you can with delivering pizzas or running a taxi service because they specifically prohibit the use of beaters. You have to pay for depreciation.

Depreciation is entirely vehicle dependent, but using the IRS reimbursement guidelines of ~$0.56/mi is quite reasonable when talking about <10yo vehicles.

There are plenty of 5-7 year old cars out there with enough miles on them to have already been fully depreciated.

Are you serious with 'loaded exploitation rhetoric'?

Consumer marketplace apps are black-boxes which completely disregard all the workers rights battles of our ancestors.

To not see this is to put too much trust in digital tech as a magic fix to all problems.

> the workers rights battles of our ancestors.

The consequence of these battles is that at least for low skill workers, all these jobs were shipped abroad (or just disappeared) where none of these rights exist. Creating huge unemployment, so now low skill workers have rights but no jobs and therefor make even less.

The fact that people are willing to take these jobs is a sign that low skill workers are ok with having lower wages and less benefits if this means getting a job and a better pay. We could ban all these jobs of course but that would not give these low skill workers rights, it would just make them unemployed again.

This general point does not apply to cleaners, drivers, and most of the gig economy.

It does apply, that's why I said:

> all these jobs were shipped abroad (or just disappeared)

If we start imposing heavy regulation on the gig economy, it will not be viable anymore, these companies will need to shut down and those jobs will disappear.

As for jobs like cleaners or waitress, companies will hire much less of them to the strict minimum. Jobs that would have existed would disappear too which is why you get long wait and horrible service in French restaurants for example where minimum wage and employee tax are super high even though France was known to invent the saying "the customer is king" and offering top tier commercial service, not anymore.

What I'm saying is that making the cost of work and hiring more expensive artificially always ends up in job losses and worse quality service. When I say artificially I mean because of government imposition, not market force (which is usually due to growth so not an issue).

You are right, we need a return of the international workers movement.

I'm surprised there's not more of this kind of worker co-op apps. These gig economy apps largely cater to region specific markets - so having enough platform scale to cover an urban agglomeration seems is good enough. If members of a profession in a city choose to go with a specific app, the demand tends to follow by word of mouth. Seems like there's a business model in building white label apps for co-ops and unions on a costs plus kind of model.

Gig Economy + Economies of Scale + Open Source make cooperatives something that makes a lot of sense economically. It takes a lot of organization effort though, and I don't know who could be the leader on that movement (unions would make sense, but I don't think they're entrepreneurial enough for it).

It doesn't seem that hard -- the things needed are a couple of free software nerds that build some sort of "UberFactory", and a city big enough where some workers unionize and are the first to create their own Uber with the UberFactory. After that other cities can copy them, and the only cost for the workers is to keep the servers running. Well, and customer support. They should be able to pay this with surplus and still get better salaries.

Don't underestimate the amount of work and coordination needed to set it in motion.

Austin got a non-profit ridesharing app after Lyft and Uber left a few years ago. It was pretty solid, although the mobile UX wasn't quite as good (which was to be expected).

When Uber and Lyft came back, they artificially lowered prices by subsidizing rides to claw business back from RideAustin, and it worked. Within a few months, RideAustin was pretty much defunct and hard to use since drivers were using the other apps.

Word of mouth only works when the local option is also the most lucrative. The problem with gig apps is the company can take their VC cash and underbid the market to weed out competition.

Predatory pricing like that ought to be illegal.

I'm not worried. People will go back to RideAustin if the paid apps raise prices. Meanwhile, I like my VC subsidized rides.

> People will go back to RideAustin if the paid apps raise prices.

...not if RideAustin ceases to operate.

It’s a strange day for capitalism when you’re being directly incentivized by the ultra wealthy to make decisions that benefit them instead of the local community. Handouts are cool as long it’s a private payer and not the government I guess.

That's ignoring the problem that outside of the greater Austin area, population 2.2 million, RideAustin is useless and suffers a bit from an advertising/discovery perspective for visitors. Both of those problems could have been solved by creating some kind of greater cooperative with other locale-driven rideshares, like say a RideHouston or RideDallas.

Ditto. I imagine there may be limited overlap between people who do the work a given coop could provide and those with the ability to start standing up a service and app. Tech hiring seems hard even for companies with large reserves of expertise...

Interested in doing this sort of work, myself.

Afterthought: an interesting test of coops like this are how well they identify and exclude/expel customers and workers that cause trouble.

The whole premise of these types of cooperatives is that they pay certain types of workers above-market wages. That puts them in a tough spot when facing competition that pays at market, since the competition can take that extra money and invest it back into the app and make a better service.

If it got large enough, how long until companies like uber try to ban you from the platform (like they did when people were driving for uber as well as lyft to increase their hourly rate)?

If they can lower pay and take away workers rights any more than they already could, these companies would not hesitate.

Worker co-ops have a long and successful history. In their favor, they can run at lower costs, treat workers better, and avoid inefficient worker/owner conflicts of interest.

The reason we don't see more, is because it is much harder to get off the ground without equity investment. Essentially, there is no exit to excite investors.

In the tutoring space markup is about $65 per hour. Tutors are often making less than 25. I don't know if there are apps for it yet, but don't pay the middle man.

Sorry for the nitpick, but I think you mean, "buyers pay $65" or "price after markup is $65"; markup is the difference between input price and sale price.

No worries about the nitpick! However, in the market of "In home" tutoring my wife was working for a company that was indeed charging around 85 to 90. Markup was 60-65, tutor was paid 20-25. (prices depended on quality of tutor).

Oh yikes! I had just assumed you couldn't have meant a markup/price difference of $65! Thanks for the follow-up!

Back in the 1980's when we sold compilers through the mail, we had deals with various mail order aggregators. They'd run full page ads with lists of software they were selling mail order, along with prices.

I was horrified that they wanted us to supply them the product for less than half of what they were selling it for. No way, I thought, they're ripping us off.

I was told that there was no other way. The reality of running an aggregator business is you have to double the wholesale cost in order to turn a profit. Most lay people terribly underestimate how much money it costs to run a business. And it was worth it for us because the aggregator was reaching far more customers than we could.

Don't pay the middle man is nice in theory, but the middle man exists because they are worth the money.

>the middle man exists because they are worth the money.

I strongly disagree with this statement.

Rent seekers are everywhere and it is never guaranteed that they are adding anything of value to the system, and often they are only extracting.

> I strongly disagree with this statement.

That means that businessmen who use middle men are incompetent fools. While that is impossible, it's highly unlikely.

Ack. I meant "possible".

I think the problem is that you have two markets that are inaccessible from either. The business buy from one market, then sell on another market. And make a profit based on how inaccessible the two markets are to each other. For example clean water can be very expensive where there aren't any, while basically free where there's plenty. So the business takes water from where it's free, then sell it where there's demand.

The term for that is arbitrage.

Back in the 1980's, software was sold packaged in a box. It was much more expensive in Europe for the same box sold in the US. Several companies noticed this and began buying up big lots in the US, shipping them overseas, and undercutting those markups.

The arbitrage was so successful the price difference was pretty much eliminated.

On my campus the best tutoring businesses isn't chegg, but the former TA for the class that shows up in your library for $20 an hour.

Austin Taxi Co-op is owned by the drivers. They have a decent app and are (slowly) working their way up to competing with Uber/Lyft. They've got the booking side down well enough but haven't tackled payment.

It will be interesting to see how that shakes out in the next five years.

On the contrary, there is no exploitation. A driver for uber (or dasher for doordash, or whatever) is legally completely allowed to create their own app to take their own orders. This is because they are independent contractors -- businesses, from a legal perspective, doing business with other businesses. As such, neither uber nor doordash nor anyone else can prevent its ICs from joining other networks (hence why many drive for lyft and uber). It would be exploitation if these individuals were employees, which is what California has recently forced in that state. This state-mandated exploitation is immoral and unjust, because it precludes workers from doing things like this.

In California, now exploited employees would first have to quit their gig job in order to join a new app that benefits them. This creates an artificial moat around starting a new app because often times these individuals would not have enough capital to be able to finance even short periods of unemployment and migration to a new platform. That is really sad.

It was cool when Uber financed all those bad car leases (because they had a certain level of new car) and made a bunch drivers indentured servants. Making them drive more and more while they cut the driver pay rate.

There is extreme exploitation, due to independent contractors not being afforded almost any worker protections. Each gig employer has no incentive, legal or otherwise, to provide for their workers. In their efforts to minimize labor costs they can employ tactics like reducing wages below minimum wage, offering no benefits, discriminating at will, and of course offering less work than could possibly sustain an employee. This last one is made particularly easy because of the ability of ICs to work for many operators: the employers know their workers will just pick up extra work on another platform, often with a cruel total of worked hours for minimal pay.

In California, these workers will now receive some of the protections offered to others. That is not a perfect situation or anything, but the current state of ICs in the gig economy is _abominable_. They will be free to seek new employment without quitting much like any other worker. Yes they wont be able to work oppressive hours for multiple employers, none of whom are providing for them. That is not a bad thing.

The gig economy is an unmitigated disaster. I'm not sure CA's solution is perfect, but it's a _big_ improvement.

Oh, you mean the protection of being forced to work for a failing employer. Yes, so much protection /s

> an artificial moat around starting a new app

In the real world we actually inhabit, where Uber and Lyft have lost money every quarter, I'm not sure "state-mandated exploitation" is the "moat."

This further demonstrates the need for a cooperative non-profit marketing agency made up of several independent small taxi-cab/logistics companies as members. It is clearly an unprofitable field but the individual merchants benefit quite a bit it would seem. Nevertheless, uber's unprofitability actually makes california's actions even more reprehensible, because not only are the drivers no longer allowed to work on their own app, but they are also forced to work, in the meantime, for a company that's losing money and likely to face bankruptcy. In other words, they're being exploited for temporary gain by the state of California, who likely just wants to get their hands on payroll tax.

There's also nothing stopping an Uber driver from doing a side deal with regular customers, where they phone the driver directly when they need a pickup, and they'll keep all the fare.

I wouldn't be surprised if that happens a lot.

Yes, I've done that before several times. If I'm asking the guy to drop me off for something and I know I need a ride later, I will ask for them to name a price and pick me up, and I'll pay in cash or via venmo or whatever. They love it because they keep more of the money, and I love it because they treat you even better.

my question is, as a consumer, how can I find cooperative platforms as distinct from exploitive ones?

Great question. There doesn't seem to be a platform specific concept similar to "Certified Employee Owned" [1], but you might consider getting in touch with Certified EO to see if they would develop one.

I too would be interested in using only non-exploitive platforms, bonus if it cuts the legs out from underneath the traditional VC funded platforms.

[1] https://www.certifiedeo.com/eo/about

One way is to do a google search for ".coop", which turns up a ton of cooperative organizations.

They could make a directory. If a ZTaxi user opens the app in an unserved city, the app should recommend similar apps that serve the city. Cut out the search engine middle man.

I'm not familiar with the ins and outs of app development, is it possible for one app to detect the presence of another? If yes then it won't take long before there will be retaliation.

Seems possible: https://sites.google.com/site/androidhowto/how-to-1/detect-i...

Anyone can explain more?

Sounds like you are suggesting a clear cut antitrust case.

That's the kind of restriction an employer would place on an employee...

Even if you could, you would run into 1099 issues (US specific) pretty quickly.

I often see Uber/Lyft drivers monitoring multiple apps for example.

Facebook used Onavo security app to recognise WhatsApp as a growing and valuable platform to buy, for 19 billion though.

It would be interesting to make a unionization app for tech workers, too. Something like blind where you can share your salary history, insider stories, etc, and use it for leverage when negotiating salary. The one thing I don't like about blind is that most of the discussions are very low quality, but you could fix that by disabling the discussion part, focusing on salary data, and perhaps company reviews (like Glassdoor) anonymously.

This is a wonderful idea

I don't get it. If there is an app that take a minimal cut, like a craigslist, wouldn't that be better for the company in the long run than suffering the PR disaster and distaste that will inevitably come after fucking over your sole reason of use?

Gym owners should band together to make a cooperative owned alternative to MindBody. It’s a disaster. Any group of companies that are hyper regional and don’t compete should try this. Same thing with restaurants and Opentable/Ordering Apps.

Decentralization technologies should help with efforts like this.

The great thing about free market capitalism is that people can form worker cooperatives anytime they want.

This pretty much sums up the entrepreneurial impact of socialism for me:

"You can be a socialist under capitalism but you can’t be a capitalist under socialism."

"Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under socialism, it's the other way around!"

"you can choose not to own slaves under slavery, but you can't choose to own slaves without it"

I just checked Up & Go site for prices. I am sure, Handy are terrible, exploitative, capitalist pigs, but they clean my place for about $40-50 less than Up & Go just quoted me. I think I am going to stick with the pigs for now.

Seize the means of production.

Is it the car, or the app?

The service itself, the economic value of it. Probably would refer to the network and it's data, and the app. The car is irrelevant. Some might get a car provided, others might use their own. Focus is to make sure there is no fight between owners of the service and operators/users. Put them all on the same level (or simpler, make the operators the owners).

You forgot to add:

???

Profit

Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

my question is are these platforms(I'm including UBER in this) actually cartels? from a legal perspective? If they don't allow individuals to set pricing.

how are they stopping individuals from setting pricing. if anything it gives them more power than traditional gig economy apps

I talking about price fixing. we're multiple sellers collude to fix pricing.

Up & Go cleaners earn $25 per hour, more than double what workers typically earned independently, according to Project Manager Sylvia Morse. While apps generally take a cut of 20 percent or more, Up & Go only takes 5 percent, which it then reinvests in the platform.

explain to me how that is bad? Also it is not multiple sellers. Up & go is one entity just like Uber

I was more asking is it illegal?

Horizontal Price Fixing

Horizontal price fixing occurs when companies decide to fix prices or price levels for a good or service at a premium or a discount. For example, several retail companies may fix the sale prices of television sets at a premium thereby earning higher profits.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pricefixing.asp

these are not companies. it is one company comprising of individuals

Well maybe Uber is a bad example because it has many competitors but the selling point of subcontracting business is usually that instead of employees having the option of working for a large variety of employers those employers will now only hire (temporarily) you if you work for a specific subcontracting business. This means the number of potential employers has been reduced from thousands or hundreds to a number you can count on your hand.

This one isn't a Cartel as its like a taxi company but co-owned by workers. But Uber could be considered a cartel because they don't consider the car drivers as workers, so they are effectively setting prices for the market of drivers.

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