Uber Lyft Strike Set to Cause Chaos or Will It Be a Big Nothing Burger?

By SF Station Staff | May 7, 2019, 1:09 pm

Be ready. Tomorrow (Wednesday, May 8th) Uber and Lyft drivers will go on strike.

Why?

Well, if you haven’t really thought much about Uber’s or Lyft’s business models or about the drivers taking you to and fro, you’re probably assuming, “Sure, they’re not getting rich, but they make a decent wage; especially if they work full-time.”

But the reality is mixed, and for some drivers, it’s the complete opposite of that assumption.

“Uber and Lyft wrote in their S-1 filings that they think they pay drivers too much already. With the IPO, Uber’s corporate owners are set to make billions, all while drivers are left in poverty and go bankrupt,” said Bhairavi Desai, executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance.

And with Lyft recently going public, and Uber planning on doing the same, the problem has come to a head. The workers are seeing the shareholders get rich, while they are left out of any plans that would allow them to earn shares or profit share.

So this is why the drivers striking now makes a lot of sense.

Because at the end of the day, this will all have been seen as an intermediate step in the process that introduced autonomous driving. And at that point, when autonomous driving is allowed, management of these companies can simply swap out the cost of drivers. They’ll supercharge their profitability and the drivers will have no leverage at all.