Re:The Drivers Cooperative
by andrepd on Friday March 26, 2021 @08:40AM
(#26591374)
Unfortunately there are two things being a barrier.
One is advertising: for many people Uber is either the only app they know or the one they see as the "standard". " To uber" has even become a verb in many languages. Uber can spend hundreds of millions of dollars per year on ads.
The other thing is operating at a loss. A co-operative, almost by definition, will produce a service at fair prices for both customers and employees (market forces dictate the price to customers as with any company, and the co-operative structure means that profits go to labour -- you know, the people actually doing stuff and creating value). A private company with never-ending billions of cash can simply operate at a loss to out-price their competitors until they close and they have achieved an even more hegemonic monopoly in their space. At some point Uber was burning 300,000,000$ per month to subsidise artificially low prices. Of course, as non-profit seeking enterprises, co-ops are plenty restricted from accessing capital in the current economic system.
Now the really interesting thing to me is how neither of these factors of advantage for private capitalistic enterprises is actually anything useful. Spending billions to drill your brand names into the brains of people is a net loss for society, distorting the market is favour of those with the biggest advertising budget, not those with the best product. In fact nearly all advertising is universally imoral in my opinion, but that's a different story. And burning venture money to artificially lower prices and further skew things is also obviously a negative.
One is advertising: for many people Uber is either the only app they know or the one they see as the "standard". " To uber" has even become a verb in many languages. Uber can spend hundreds of millions of dollars per year on ads.
The other thing is operating at a loss. A co-operative, almost by definition, will produce a service at fair prices for both customers and employees (market forces dictate the price to customers as with any company, and the co-operative structure means that profits go to labour -- you know, the people actually doing stuff and creating value). A private company with never-ending billions of cash can simply operate at a loss to out-price their competitors until they close and they have achieved an even more hegemonic monopoly in their space. At some point Uber was burning 300,000,000$ per month to subsidise artificially low prices. Of course, as non-profit seeking enterprises, co-ops are plenty restricted from accessing capital in the current economic system.
Now the really interesting thing to me is how neither of these factors of advantage for private capitalistic enterprises is actually anything useful. Spending billions to drill your brand names into the brains of people is a net loss for society, distorting the market is favour of those with the biggest advertising budget, not those with the best product. In fact nearly all advertising is universally imoral in my opinion, but that's a different story. And burning venture money to artificially lower prices and further skew things is also obviously a negative.