Is Uber vs taxi companies a good example of the superiority of when workers have control to the means of production?

Nope. What about dead miles and dead hours? With Uber you are only paid per ride, meaning driving it to refuel or service comes out of your pocket (along with the actual bill for fuel and repairs) same with waiting for a fare.

Did that co-op Swift app mentioned in there get up and running yet?

you understand that uber is profiting mostly because it can exploit their """voluntary employees""" in the way that owners of the normal taxi companies can not?

hahahaha

Why do left wing millennials have such a hard on for tech companies?

Jews, porkies, and freemasons have brainwashed the West for 4 generations non-stop. What they fuck did you think would happen?

Uber is proof that ownership of capital is no longer synonymous with ownership of the means of production.

Because they've been told all their lives that technology and the brilliance of tech entrepreneurs will save them. They are nurtured from teat to diploma on a steady pap of peanut butter and plastic straws solving hungry and waterlessness problems in Africa. The next app is right around the corner that will fix their problems. Having a job is passe. With apps like gofer and uber you can work when you want for as long as you want. Humanity might be facing extinction due to environmental devastation, SpaceX is going to get us to Mars and we won't have to worry about it. Never mind where the ecological damage is coming from, you need to get working on that STEM degree.

just

Read marx

marx is a spook

Sure, Uber is pretty evil to their totally-not-employees, but the reason they can provide a better service to customers is because of better technology.
There's nothing stopping a taxi co-op from setting something similar up, yet for some reason they don't.

Actually, I stand corrected. Apparently they've started to do so in some areas and are actually able to compete with Uber while treating their employees much better.
wsj.com/articles/uber-vs-the-new-taxi-hailing-apps-1444412846

The only reason Uber could grow so huge in the first place was because the Taxi companies didn't even attempt to innovate.

This. Uber isn't succeeding because of its prices (this is the issue you guys have, basically, right? assuming capitalism of course. that the drivers end up eating a lot of costs?), it's due to its superior service.
vs taxi:

That's literally just the uber app. It could be replicated by just about anyone else with ease.

And yet Uber were the first ones to do it on any significant scale. It should have been done a decade ago.

Uber does not produce anything, it just provides a service. So even if uber was under the control of it's workers (which it most definitely isn't), it's not an example of "workers control of production".

This is just another example of why "Workers Control of the Means of Production" is a retarded and incorrect definition of socialism. Socialism is the abolition of capital.

Yeah nah, this is not "our victory."

Because no company prior was willing to go through with the massive bait-and-switch plot they pulled with the drivers before.
The idea has been around for a long while and has been tried here and there, but only Uber figured out how to manipulate the recruitment of drivers itself to entrench their enterprise.

Except this isn't really "workers control" of the means of production. It's worker's ownership, as the drivers themselves own the cars that they use to conduct business, but they have consistently shrinking agency over what they are permitted to do with those cars and how they conduct said business. It's a top-down scheme that the workers themselves have no actual say in the operation of; the workers have no actual control in the matter.

There are taxi companies implementing their own versions right now and managing to compete on price and service. No bait-and-switch was needed. The taxi companies were just too fucking slow and unwilling to standardize the user-facing side of it before Uber came along.

Uber didn't do this though - it's not like somebody could just go independent before

If Uber is so great why are its drivers constantly striking?

Who said it was great? Uber is everything that is wrong with today's tech companies and wall street.

It's an example of neoliberalism inadvertently positively reforming an industry because said industry was a victim of regulatory capture.

Taxi rides were so expensive because of the medallion system. Do be a legal taxi you had have a medallion, the number of medallions was controlled by the city.

Parasitic rent seekers bought the medallions and charged exhorbriant rents, like in Phoenix it like 100k a year, I've heard in NYC it's in the millions.

That's why taxi cabs were always so dirty and the drivers over worked surly immigrants. Practically all of the profit was going to medallion owners.

Uber cut out those Middle men representing a legitimate efficiency to the industry. But of course it was to be parasitic employers themselves

But they still have not gotten back the stake in the market that they used to have, meaning Uber still dominates most business both in terms of notability and total business conducted.
There was a bait-and-switch to get drivers to sign on with uber in the first place. Without that immediate surge of drivers to work under Uber, the standardization and customer convenience wouldn't have been useful as there wouldn't have been enough drivers to get full coverage for the market it was trying to seize. By first bringing in large numbers of drivers, they got all the coverage they'd need for the customers. The problem was that those drivers signed on because of the comparably high "wages" they'd earn under Uber, which Uber proceeded to then cut once they'd gotten into a position of dominance and started to face competition by others who would work on similar models. Uber has created great user-side convenience at the cost of worsening conditions for the workers operating within it due to the management of said system.

You at least had some choice in the companies you could work under. Now, in places where Uber is highly popular, there really aren't any other options if you want to work as a taxi driver. Not only that, but Uber has now set wages at a standard of "barely livable," but still can operate on the knowledge that most of the drivers they employ have little in the way of alternative prospects (especially if they've already put forward the investment in buying, fitting, and insuring a car to work with). This has only exacerbated the problems in the rest of the industry, as competition will also be encouraged to lower rates even further, which is telling considering those rates were usually pretty low to begin with even before Uber.

Also this. Efficiency is great, but the returns still aren't being seen by the workers themselves.

...

It's a false choice when they're all shit though.

You can work for porky, or you can start your own taxi company.

On the other hand, if you are a taxi driver, you have to fulfill evry requirement the government can throw at you. You don't need that as an Uber driver.
There is no favouritism though. That's syndicalist nonsense.