Take This Job and Love It: Worker cooperatives offer an alternative to keeping power and profits in the hands of a few rich people.

• Author: Noor, Jaisal

In the six years that Michael Ugwu has worked as an Uber driver in New York City, he's seen a growing share of his earnings diverted into venture capitalists' pockets. Uber and Lyft require workers to assume a myriad of expenses that can quickly trap drivers like Ugwu into debt and poverty.

"Currently, they're taking out between 35 to 40 percent, when you add up all the deductions," Ugwu says. "You end up not having enough to pay rent, maintain the car, pay the car loan, and buy gas. They're continuously ripping us off."

By 2017, rideshare drivers were earning less than half what they made just four years earlier, a study found. Meanwhile, executives at Lyft and Uber have raked in tens of millions of dollars in compensation.

Now some New York City drivers, including Ugwu, are becoming their own bosses by joining worker coops--democratic workplaces that are owned and run by their workers. It allows them to make a living wage and participate in workplace democracy.

In May 2021, Ugwu and 2,500 other drivers launched the Drivers Cooperative, a ridesharing company that lets them keep 85 percent of their fares and share in any annual profits. It has no investor shareholders or executive compensation. By comparison, Uber's chief executive earned $64 million in 2019-2020, hundreds of times more than a typical driver's salary of about $30,000 per year, according to an independent analysis.

By July, more than 30,000 people had installed the Drivers Cooperative's app, Co-op Ride, which can be downloaded from the App Store or Google Play and works just like other rideshare apps. "Co-op Ride is a conscious choice that you can take," Drivers Cooperative co-founder Ken Lewis tells The Progressive.

The Drivers Cooperative surpassed 3,500 active drivers in July, making it the largest worker co-op in the United States. But it is just one piece in a much larger movement. The National Center for Employee Ownership estimates that fourteen million people participate in employee stock ownership plans that give ownership but not management rights to workers.

A much smaller number of people, around 10,000, are employed at worker owned and run co-ops, according to Mo Manklang, policy director of the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives. The majority, she says, are people of color or immigrants. These workers are emerging in new sectors like the rideshare industry, food delivery, and even video streaming. They are taking on billion-dollar firms by raising capital from the communities they serve.

"The Drivers Cooperative means everything to me now, because I see it as my own business," Ugwu says. "I will do anything that I possibly can to see that we...