Lyft and Uber said they will cease operations in Minneapolis after the city’s council voted Thursday to override a mayoral veto and require that ride-hailing services increase driver wages to the equivalent of the local minimum wage of $15.57 an hour.
Lyft called the ordinance “deeply flawed,” saying in a statement that it supports a minimum earning standard for drivers but not the one passed by the council.
Like, in Seattle, I’m taking Lyfts and Ubers for ~$35 for a 20 minute drive. They could pay their driver $16 to cover the minimum wage for the full hour and then they still have OVER 50% of what I pay. Like, it’s such simple business economics. Why can’t these big corporations figure it out? I hope they get taken over by local services that actually pay their workers.
I don’t know the economics, truly, but there are a LOT more expenses involved in running a large business like Uber on top of driver wages, such as technology service and hardware costs, programmers and central admin/customer service, rent or cost of buildings including utilities, insurance, taxes, fees, consulting and auditing, cybersecurity, legal, and probably quite a bit more I can’t think of. Running a business is friggin expensive.
Definitely not defending paying workers less, just trying to explain why they still might not be in the black even in your scenario.
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They would only need to pay the driver 1/3 of the hourly wage for your 20 min ride so 5.3 dollars. Uber/Lyft would make 29-30 dollars.
That’s assuming the cars always have a fare on board - one truth of running a taxi is that there’s a lot of downtime when you don’t have a customer.
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