After seven years of driving for Uber, Phred Riggs had enough.
Riggs said the company deactivated his account five times over the last five years for no reason. He also didn’t like how Uber would sometimes stack rides together, which sometimes made him take up to four different rides simultaneously. It started to feel like his 2016 Ford Fusion was turning into a bus, he said.
Then his earnings began to drop even though he accepted the same number of rides. For instance, he used to earn $35 for a roughly twenty-three-mile one-way trip from Downtown Denver to Denver International Airport. When Riggs quit, he was earning $19 for the same trip. It was unlike anything he had seen in his more than four-decade career as a driver.
“Last time I checked, they didn’t move the airport any closer,” Riggs quipped.
So Riggs decided to join the Drivers Cooperative, a national coalition offering rideshare drivers better pay and working conditions than Uber and Lyft. The Colorado branch of the cooperative launched in September 2024 and already represents more than four thousand drivers, and it has a customer base of about 14,000 riders, according to Isaac Chinyoka, the co-op’s general manager.
Similar cooperatives have been organized in Minnesota and New York. Minsun Ji, the co-op’s executive director, said she is engaging lawyers in cities like Las Vegas, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, and Miami to create more local cooperatives. Ji said the goal is to create a federation of rideshare drivers to consolidate their power and increase their resources to compete with corporate behemoths like Uber and Lyft. She also expects the cooperatives to represent as many drivers and riders as the Colorado branch once they are launched.
“I think it’s a really important time for us to think about a way to set up the cooperative so that all workers can claim higher wages for themselves and give them more voice,” Ji told Jacobin.
Uber and Lyft did not…
Auteur: Robert Davis
