Don't forget what happened to Walnut when it priced its moving services for fairness and equity: <a href="https://medium.com/@nickbkim/why-were-closing-walnut-a452225e7127" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@nickbkim/why-were-closing-walnut-a452225...</a><p>Everyone wants fairness and equity until the time comes for each to pay for it.<p>I'm saying this in a disappointed tone as I really would like platform cooperatives to work but they're going to fail to compete in a relatively open market of a capitalist society. Also, everyone working in IT for these platforms becomes the exploited. It's inverted exploitation. Programmer: you're being paid less than what you'd make in a free market. If you're not getting your flat cleaned twice a week as a member of this cooperative, you're doing it wrong. You, my friend, are being taken to the proverbial cleaners.
Despite the loaded exploitation rhetoric in the article, if competitors can come into the market that is better for the workers, that’s great. And if it raises the standards for the privately owned apps, that’s even better. This seems like a win all around.
I'm surprised there's not more of this kind of worker co-op apps. These gig economy apps largely cater to region specific markets - so having enough platform scale to cover an urban agglomeration seems is good enough. If members of a profession in a city choose to go with a specific app, the demand tends to follow by word of mouth. Seems like there's a business model in building white label apps for co-ops and unions on a costs plus kind of model.
In the tutoring space markup is about $65 per hour. Tutors are often making less than 25. I don't know if there are apps for it yet, but don't pay the middle man.
Austin Taxi Co-op is owned by the drivers. They have a decent app and are (slowly) working their way up to competing with Uber/Lyft. They've got the booking side down well enough but haven't tackled payment.<p>It will be interesting to see how that shakes out in the next five years.
On the contrary, there is no exploitation. A driver for uber (or dasher for doordash, or whatever) is legally completely allowed to create their own app to take their own orders. This is because they are independent contractors -- businesses, from a legal perspective, doing business with other businesses. As such, neither uber nor doordash nor anyone else can prevent its ICs from joining other networks (hence why many drive for lyft and uber). It would be exploitation if these individuals were employees, which is what California has recently forced in that state. This state-mandated exploitation is immoral and unjust, because it precludes workers from doing things like this.<p>In California, now exploited employees would first have to quit their gig job in order to join a new app that benefits them. This creates an artificial moat around starting a new app because often times these individuals would not have enough capital to be able to finance even short periods of unemployment and migration to a new platform. That is really sad.
I'm not familiar with the ins and outs of app development, is it possible for one app to detect the presence of another? If yes then it won't take long before there will be retaliation.
It would be interesting to make a unionization app for tech workers, too. Something like blind where you can share your salary history, insider stories, etc, and use it for leverage when negotiating salary. The one thing I don't like about blind is that most of the discussions are very low quality, but you could fix that by disabling the discussion part, focusing on salary data, and perhaps company reviews (like Glassdoor) anonymously.
I don't get it. If there is an app that take a minimal cut, like a craigslist, wouldn't that be better for the company in the long run than suffering the PR disaster and distaste that will inevitably come after fucking over your sole reason of use?
Gym owners should band together to make a cooperative owned alternative to MindBody. It’s a disaster. Any group of companies that are hyper regional and don’t compete should try this. Same thing with restaurants and Opentable/Ordering Apps.
I just checked Up & Go site for prices. I am sure, Handy are terrible, exploitative, capitalist pigs, but they clean my place for about $40-50 less than Up & Go just quoted me. I think I am going to stick with the pigs for now.
my question is are these platforms(I'm including UBER in this) actually cartels? from a legal perspective? If they don't allow individuals to set pricing.