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Lyft and Uber say they will leave Minneapolis after city council forces them to pay drivers more

https://apnews.com/article/minneapolis-uber-lyft-ridehailing-minimum-wage-d60db6a2e2580dc1d93c438a8cffa5ee

Lyft and Uber say they will cease operations in Minneapolis after the city’s council voted Thursday to override a mayoral veto and require ride-hailing services to increase driver wages to the equivalent of the local hourly minimum wage of $15.57.

Lyft and Uber say they will leave Minneapolis after city council forces them to pay drivers more

Lyft and Uber said they will cease operations in Minneapolis after the city’s council voted Thursday to override a mayoral veto and require that ride-hailing services increase driver wages to the equivalent of the local minimum wage of $15.57 an hour.

Lyft called the ordinance “deeply flawed,” saying in a statement that it supports a minimum earning standard for drivers but not the one passed by the council.

36 comments

halcyoncmdr

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If a business cannot operate while paying a livable wage, it does not need to exist. That doesn't mean minimum wage, that means a liveable wage.

Any business that's not even willing to do the minimum... Fuck 'em.

rockSlayer

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Well the living wage in the twin cities is roughly $23/hr while living alone with no kids, so it's still a ways off. However, I actually hope they leave. Then metro transit has good reason to greatly expand the lightrail lines

LesserAbe

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I hope they get something similar to the Driver's Cooperative, which is like Uber/Lyft but owned but the drivers themselves. Right now though my understanding is they're only in NYC/Denver.

rockSlayer

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Yep, I know the CWAer that helped form the coop in Denver! Driver co-ops will become very popular as people realize they're getting screwed by these companies

Zachariah

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And if the public still needs the service that a business can’t fill, it should be publicly funded and pay its employees a living wage.

AngryCommieKender

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It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By "business" I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.

-FDR

http://docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/odnirast.html

knotthatone

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Democratic Gov Tim Walz, who vetoed a bill last year that would have boosted pay for Uber and Lyft drivers, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that he was concerned because so many depend on those services, including disabled people.

I get the sentiment, but relying on private for-profit companies to provide basic transportation services in a city is stupid. That's how Minneapolis got in this situation.

Gonkulator

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isles

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relying on private for-profit companies to provide basic transportation services in a city is stupid

While true, it hurts fewer people to build up the alternative before cutting off the current system. I don't know (and doubt) if Minneapolis is doing that specifically, but Minnesota has been on a progressive tear and I hope they keep going.

e_t_

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Don't let the door hit you on the way out

LemmyKnowsBest

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That's great but now all the Uber and Lyft drivers in Minneapolis will have to find a different gig.

dumpsterlid

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Sure, I will believe Uber and Lyft are going to leave when they actually do.

See the thing is, as titanic as these “rideshare” companies are they don’t fucking do anything but maintain a shitty app and provide some kind of legal stability.

All it takes is for one functional socialist worker cooperative to get a basic ass rideshare app off the ground and if it starts to build serious momentum even in an American city or two all of a sudden the billions and billions of dollars that rideshare companies claim they are worth starts to turn invisible like one of those parts to a time travel movie where a character has begun to turn transparent and disappear because they have been erased from the timeline.

The vast majority of the time these companies aren’t going to want to take that risk, or if they do they are idiots for doing so.

We don’t need software companies like this the way we need electronics companies, grocery stores, power companies and other modern conveniences that take massive, physical organizations of material.

Sure software isn’t trivial to do, having that amount of servers isn’t trivial to do but how much do you REALLY need a year to fund development, hosting and maintenance of a rideshare app owned by a worker collective or open sourced? 5 million a year? That barely buys the CEO of Ubers office furnishings I bet.

LesserAbe

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I just posted elsewhere in this thread I hope they get something like Driver's Cooperative.

dumpsterlid

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Hell yeah!

MajorHavoc

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It'll be tough finding someone who can build a phone app that consumes both the Square API and the Google Maps API. /s

Minneapolis may have to settle for only 11 separate college students filling the gap out of their dorm rooms.

rockSlayer

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I'm an organizer, I'd gladly help gig drivers form a worker cooperative

NutWrench

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The minimum wage should have been $15 an hour 10 years ago.

gardylou

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Fuck Lyft and Uber. Mass transit FTW.

Maggoty

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Oh good. Maybe a regional competitor can get a hold then. It's not exactly a small market.

It's also for this reason I don't think Lyft and Uber would actually leave.

themurphy

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They will leave.

They have left countries all together because of this.

xmunk

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I hope they don't let the door hit them on the way out... we don't want ass prints on the door.

Maggoty

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Well In that case someone call up the IWW. Let's fire up some computers.

blady_blah

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This is so weird. Why would they not just pay their drivers more. Add it directly to the cost of doing business. What's the issue?

It's like making a minimum wage for all fast food employees. All fast food establishments now have higher wage costs. So what? The cost of a hamburger goes up $0.50. All your competitors now have the same costs. How does this change anything for you? Versus going out of business?

Think about if only Uber left. That's a lot of extra business for Lyft. What's the big deal? Hm... maybe they have to cover the salary even if the driver doesn't accept any rides? Maybe that's the real issue. How do you guarantee drivers are busy and not just signing in and doing nothing and canceling offered rides? That still doesn't seem that hard to fix.

roofuskit

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Their only edge over taxi companies was their ability to avoid current labor laws.

sxan

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I don't know if taxi companies have upped their online game, but Uber and Lyft's huge advantage used to be that the customer could see what the ride would cost them, when their ride would arrive, and pay online. Those of us old enough can remember days when you'd worry about whether a taxi driver was going to take the scenic route, whether you'd have enough cash, whether they'd accept a credit card, whether they'd add some surcharge to credit card transactions, and then having to trust your credit card to yet another random stranger. Having to use taxis used to be a reliable source of stress when traveling; Uber utterly removed that (if you were male; I know women have additional sources of angst when getting into cars with strangers).

If Taxi companies have gotten their online shit together, where I can see the entire transaction - times and costs - in advance, then yeah, I'll agree with you. But originally, Uber and Lyft were huge game changers for customers.

roofuskit

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Taxis have upped their app game. And a lot of people prefer taxis and drivers who actually know where they are going. Uber and Lyft started by discounting rides and paying for them with VC money. After they took enough taxi market share they had to switch to making a profit so they took it from driver pay. Their only path for making a profit is their ability to skirt labor laws. That's why they want to pull out of markets that force them to pay drivers better.

sxan

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You've convinced me. I'll never take Uber or Lyft again.

Tell me one thing: if I'm visit some city, whether in the US or elsewhere, is there a reliable taxi app that works pretty much everywhere, or do I have to search for a local one?

Spaceballstheusername

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They're afraid more cities will do this and as they increase prices they won't be able to take more of the pie.

flames5123

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Like, in Seattle, I’m taking Lyfts and Ubers for ~$35 for a 20 minute drive. They could pay their driver $16 to cover the minimum wage for the full hour and then they still have OVER 50% of what I pay. Like, it’s such simple business economics. Why can’t these big corporations figure it out? I hope they get taken over by local services that actually pay their workers.

FederatedSaint

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I don't know the economics, truly, but there are a LOT more expenses involved in running a large business like Uber on top of driver wages, such as technology service and hardware costs, programmers and central admin/customer service, rent or cost of buildings including utilities, insurance, taxes, fees, consulting and auditing, cybersecurity, legal, and probably quite a bit more I can't think of. Running a business is friggin expensive.

Definitely not defending paying workers less, just trying to explain why they still might not be in the black even in your scenario.

Daft_ish

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They shouldn't even exist in the space since they skirted regulators when setting up. It's like if the pirate bay set themselves up as a legitimate business.

Mycatiskai

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They would only need to pay the driver 1/3 of the hourly wage for your 20 min ride so 5.3 dollars. Uber/Lyft would make 29-30 dollars.

xmunk

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That's assuming the cars always have a fare on board - one truth of running a taxi is that there's a lot of downtime when you don't have a customer.

gardylou

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The extrapolated head math people like to do based on their narrow interactions to determine how large companies should run is rarely right or useful.

jacksilver

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I find it concerning that they both decide to leave due to price increases. Seems like if lyft stayed when Uber left they could easily make more being the only player. How does stuff like this not scream collusion.

Mirshe

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It's more that all of these rideshare companies rely solely on undercutting every other cab company in the area - by not paying a living wage and forcing drivers to use their own vehicles (thus paying for their own gas and maintenance), they avoid a lot of operating expenses. They manage to do this by billing themselves as tech companies instead of any sort of transport company, and cities have been forced to go along with it purely out of convenience and mass adoption.

masquenox

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And nothing of value will be lost.

Daft_ish

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Bye Felicia

DeadPand

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I guess that kinda sucks for the workers