Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey vetoed a ride hail bill that would have guaranteed a minimum wage to all ride hail drivers on Tuesday.  According to the Associated Press, Frey instead “secured a commitment” with Uber—but not Lyft—to pay drivers in Minneapolis $15.19 an hour for time spent transporting riders in the city, which is already the Minneapolis minimum wage for large companies. Uber and Lyft drivers are classified as independent contractors in Minnesota and not bound by the city’s minimum wage laws for workers. The bill was approved by the Minneapolis City Council in a 7-5 vote last ..read more

Lyft, a taxi company that also operates the largest bikeshare networks in North America including New York City and Washington, D.C.’s systems, wants help subsidizing the business or be rid of it altogether in a bid to achieve overall profitability, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.  “Lyft has received strong inbound interest in our bikes and scooters business,” Lyft wrote in a blog post. “It’s only logical for Lyft to listen to credible proposals and explore strategic partners and options in several forms to serve more riders in more cities.” A Lyft spokesperson declined ..read more

The most telling sentence in the Wall Street Journal’s feature story on Uber’s CEO Dara Khosrowshahi occasionally driving for his own company is the first one. It says that, “After five years running Uber, Dara Khosrowshahi in September got behind the wheel himself.” The context of the story is that Uber has battled a driver and delivery worker shortage for years. It has struggled to square the circle on how to provide these services at a low enough price that people will be willing to pay for it but also pay its workers well enough so they keep doing it, all while financing a very expensive c ..read more

The cost of an Uber or Lyft ride has skyrocketed as the firms seek steady profitability, but workers aren’t getting a proportional share of the spoils. A report released last week by the UCLA Labor Center found that Uber and Lyft took an even larger share of drivers’ profits as fares increased in recent years.  Between February 2019 and April 2022, “median driver pay increased by 31% compared to an increase of 50% for median passenger fare,” according to the report, which parsed data from 50 million trips.  The researchers looked at data from New York City Taxi & Limousine Commis ..read more

Californians will vote today on Proposition 30, a measure that would help pay for electric cars for low and moderate income Californians, the infrastructure to support them, and more funding to fight wildfires. It will fund these initiatives by taxing the rich, specifically an extra 1.75 percent on earnings over $2 million. And, if the polls are accurate, Proposition 30 will fail. Why is Prop 30, an idea that is essentially to tax the rich to fight climate change, seemingly faring so poorly in a state where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans almost two to one? One reason is that Prop 3 ..read more

On Tuesday, the Biden administration released a proposal that could force so-called gig economy companies like Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash to classify their workers as employees. With the announcement, Uber’s stock was down as much as 17 percent, Lyft’s fell by 16 percent, and DoorDash’s had slipped 12 percent. For well over a decade, the core strategy deployed by gig economy firms has been to obscure fundamentally unprofitable unit economics by upcharging on services and minimizing labor costs. The chief method to minimize labor costs has long been to misclassify workers as independent contracto ..read more

On Wednesday, there was a great disturbance on Twitter, as if thousands of writers suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced: the Food and Drug Administration is reportedly preparing to ban Juul Labs Inc. e-cigarettes in the United States. Why Juul and not, say, any other e-cigarette company? Or why not the entire vaping industry? It ultimately boils down to the fact that our regulators are unambitious cowards. Like many companies, such as Uber, Juul enjoyed early success because it brazenly broke laws. In Juul's case, it advertised its products to children before pivoting and ad ..read more

A recent Wall Street Journal article about two once-hyped tech companies reads almost like an entire investor class suddenly took an Econ 101 course. Two companies that went public with market capitalizations in the tens of billions of dollars despite never coming close to making money are jacking up prices and therefore cratering customer demand in a vain attempt to turn its service into one with huge markups to pay off a bloated corporate overhead structure, even though they offer services with several meaningful alternatives. Turns out, that’s a really shitty business proposition. I am talk ..read more

Tech giants Airbnb, Lyft, and Uber have “expressed interest” in using technology from controversial facial recognition firm Clearview AI for identity verification, according to a statement from Clearview AI’s CEO Hoan Ton-That provided to Motherboard. The news signals how Clearview AI may expand its products beyond investigative tools for law enforcement. Previously the company explored partnerships with members of the private sector such as Macy’s and Walmart, before promising to cancel all contracts with private companies, Buzzfeed News previously reported. Now, the statement sent on Tuesday ..read more

Want the best of VICE News straight to your inbox? Sign up here. Between 2017 and 2019, Lyft received more than 4,000 reports of sexual assault, according to the ride-sharing app’s first-ever “safety report.” The report, released Thursday, breaks down sexual assault into five categories, including non-consensual sexual penetration, attempted sexual penetration, and non-consensual touching and kissing of body parts. Between 2017 and 2019, Lyft consistently received the most reports of “non-consensual touching of a sexual body part.” In 2019, more than 1,000 such reports came in—up from 598 ..read more