Regardless of what these articles may say, the vast majority of medallions are owned by private companies, not independent contractors. Drivers need to be licensed, but medallions are associated to cars, not necessarily people. And this is not a new phenomenon at all [0]
Effectively, Uber and Lyft did more damage to companies than individuals.
Companies that also speculated with the medallion prices by the way, as most were bought and sold privately, not by governments. How do you think they got to cost a million bucks in NYC back in 2013?
[0] https://slate.com/business/2012/06/taxi-medallions-how-new-y...
That doesn't mean we shouldn't be concerned about those who lost their jobs because highly speculative investment companies went under, but it is clearly not the same.
Why should I care more about a startup worker who doesn’t get a paycheck next week than a taxi driver who can no longer feed his family because of new market entrants or a laid off machinist in an industry struggling to compete with subsidized overseas labor.
Make it simple I’m dumb and think each of them has the same claim on human dignity and a financial safety net.
If you think that putting money in a reputable bank is the same as gambling a few millions buying government licenses from private hands, then I don’t know what to tell you.
SVB investors aren’t getting their money back either.
Also, this has nothing to do with globalisation. You are mixing things up. And again, kind of ironic that you would blame cheap overseas labour, while sympathising with immigrants driving taxis around NYC. Pick a lane, mate.
They didn't have enough capital for the medallions in hand of course, these were mostly immigrant strivers who worked and toiled and deeply tapped their entire network of friends and family for down payments and were heavily leveraged for the rest.
Then Silicon Valley VC's purposefully made it impossible for them to compete using a massive wash of cheap capital.
What's that you say? The free market is tough, and they should have been able to adequately understand the risks? What can you do if they put their money into something and it didn't pan out right? The game has rules right? No take backs.
Oh.