Recently someone wrote a post about replacing the current exploitive gig economy companies. It was upvoted to the top list. A few days later, someone else wrote a piece excoriating the first for pretending that an exploitive structure could be reformed if only they were at the top. It was upvoted to the top list.
I do think the gig economy is exploitive, and while I wouldn't want to do it under the current terms, I drove for Uber back when the pay was better, and I enjoyed many of my trips. Some passengers just wanted a quiet ride, but others wanted to chat and I learned a lot and enjoyed those rides.
Thinking about the two recent posts, it seems that an obvious solution would be to form a driver owned co-operative to compete with the established/abusive players. Since rideshare and delivery are capital intensive and the drivers provide the big capital investment, the cars, a driver owned co-op would satisfy the second poster's concerns while providing the fair work environment the first described.
Co-ops can be tricky to set up, and the method for assigning votes to workers will often dictate who the co-op serves best. For example, in the ride-share/delivery co-op I'm proposing, if every driver gets one vote, policies will tend to be set to benefit the part-timers, but if votes are assigned by a measure of work done (trips completed, deliveries made, miles driven, etc.) then the policies drift towards the concerns of the full-time workers.
I'm going to list some things that should be worked out and clearly communicated to prospective members before inviting them to join a co-op. I would appreciate additions to the list or comments on my items.
1) how votes are assigned and how decisions are made. (I've been trying to find a copies of articles about decision making in co-ops from a pre-internet East Bay Express. One described how decision making at a feminist co-op the author worked at was so dysfunctional and indecisive she felt relieved when she went back to a standard hierarchical workplace. Another described a functioning co-operative bakery and went into detail about the steps they'd taken to make sure all workers had a voice. That last one discussed things like requiring a firm agenda published in advance so workers would know if something they cared about was going to be voted on, and to prevent the same slightly unpopular topic from being brought up for vote after vote until its proponents finally got it passed. The interviewee described the firm agenda rules as giving a voice to the quieter workers who otherwise felt dominated by the louder ones.)
2) how members are paid and what fees or percentages go to the co-op for overall expenses. (Again, looking for an article from the past. This one was from, I think, SF Weekly, and discussed the problems a large cash surplus was causing for a cooperative business named Good Vibrations. Much of the money was earned by workers dealing with difficult customers for ideological reasons and that co-op easily out competed for-profit stores that couldn't pay women enough to do the job. The accumulated profit was large enough to make distributing it both difficult to do fairly and potentially divisive.)
3) how prices are set.
4) how co-op members are involuntarily removed. (One of the problems with forming a co-operative business out of a large set of people is that some people suck, and also some good people are so bad at their job they're a burden on their coworkers.)
I think those are the basics.
What am I missing?