People profiting from these types of companies should feel bad about themselves.
edit: Unemployment insurance is paid by companies for their workers who may use it in the future. It's not a shared social obligation from taxes. Nor is everyone eligible to use it merely by existing.
[0] https://www.edd.ca.gov/about_edd/coronavirus-2019/pandemic-u...
[1] https://www.edd.ca.gov/about_edd/coronavirus-2019/cares-act....
I'm guessing unemployment insurance didn't cover a lot of the rest of the unemployed either for COVID (as it ran out due to never being designed for this situation) so it came from taxes. In which case no one paid into the social safety net except through taxes (which Lyft/Uber are not exempt from).
Maybe you don’t foresee a pandemic, but only in the same way that you don’t foresee getting side-swiped when a car passes you while blowing its tire. Or having your house’s roof ripped off by a tornado. Totally unforeseeable events, but somewhat predicable circumstances.
The bailouts in crises are not one off because there’s always going to be another crisis.
Taking care of contractors who work for employers that arbitrage labor protections == corporate bailouts.
Do we have public school available nationally?
A single "national unemployment insurance scheme" is not at all the same thing as 50 separate state schemes.
Please list the historical unemployment insurance bailouts that covered contractors.
In a competitive market there is no such thing as “free profit” for companies. Most savings that apply to all market competition across the board transfer to lower prices in the general market.
Uber would only net the profit if for some reason it was the only company that didn’t have to offer those things out of pocket.
“That’s how the world works” is the oldest justification for injustice.
If capitalism really is just a spreadsheet feudalism that deprives even the yacht owners of human moral autonomy, then maybe it’s time to burn down the system. NB: I don’t buy it, and I think markets can function alongside patriotic responsibility.
Yes, it's because they are expecting future returns on their "burnt" money. But considering the risks, the enormous amounts involved, the meagre margins involved even in a market dominant postion and that there are still no signs of profitability or even positive cash flow, I don't see how this can be seen as just a wealth transfert from society to the wealthy. Even in their best case scenario, they will be able to get meagre returns from perpetually capital intensive, low margin businesses. That's far from obscene wealth extraction imo.
Sure, some early VCs made tons of money off of this new era of unicorns, but that was pretty much all coming from other VC or private equity that have had to keep the money pump going.
VC's get their money from everyone else: pension funds, college endowments, charitable foundation endowments, and insurance companies.
It quite literally is a case of our children funding this.
But it's true that VCs, private equity and bull markets in general, which people always think of as profiting mostly very rich people are actually essential to fund most retirement plans, pensions and insurances.
But in the past decade pension funds have increased their "alternative" investments since their traditional bread and butter,bonds and fixed income, have had abysmal yields due to low interest rates. Yet with pension payout obligations having only gotten bigger (especially in europe, with the aging population, the pressure to generate returns is pushing the fund managers to seek out riskier and riskier investments.
Uber has claimed that more than 80% of all the fares ever collected has directly gone to drivers. By creating massive demand mostly in the well-off parts of a city, it opens up a channel for one-to-one wealth transfer to the predominantly less well-off drivers.
This is quite different from other platforms that suck up money from local economies and then disburse most of them to the elite few, or park the cash in some offshore accounts.
I think there's a nuance here that is often lost in this kind of discussion about inequality.
If there was no unemployment insurance uber and lyft would still exist and saying that uber and lyft depend on these social safety nets is just dishonest rhetoric.