Some Uber, Lyft Drivers To Get Stock in IPOs (wsj.com)

Ride-hailing companies Uber and Lyft are planning to give some drivers money to buy stock in their initial public offerings, WSJ reported Thursday [The link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From a report: Both Uber and Lyft's IPOs will include programs that would give some of their most-active or longest-serving drivers a cash award with an option to put it toward stock in the IPOs, according to people familiar with the matter. It is typically hard for an ordinary investor to buy a company's stock at its IPO price before it begins trading on an exchange, so this move would give drivers access they likely wouldn't have had otherwise.

Uber is working out the details of a program expected to be valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars that would give a significant portion of its 3 million active drivers and couriers globally either a cash bonus or the option to use that cash to purchase shares at the IPO price, people familiar with the matter said. These awards will be tiered based on a sliding scale related to the driver's length of service and number of trips or deliveries, these people said.

Comments

Don't Miss Out

[Anonymous Coward]

Funnel your paycheck into our ponzi scheme today!

Last I checked Uber's model was trading investor cash for market share and had arrived at diminishing returns. Sounds like the perfect time to let the public buy in.

Re:Is this usual for customers?

[Nkwe]

Exactly. In the debate about drivers being employees vs. contractors or some other non-employee legal status that these companies want to think they are (in order to get out of paying benefits and other requirements that are involved with having employees), it would seem that offering access to the IPO would be an argument that they are in fact employees.

Not exactly

[rsilvergun]

the entire economic systems does it. Here's how it works: You work hard, get a good job, but you don't have a college degree. You move up in your company, but then the layoffs come. Outsourcing, automation, H1-B replacement. You're out. Now you're starting over. HR filters mean you can't get an equivalent job because your lack of a college degree means you don't even get a human being to look at your resume. You could lie and say you have a degree, but you'll fail the background checks (that are now universal and cheap).

But you've got this car from when you had a good job. A few years old, 30,40k miles. You gotta pay rent/mortgage. So you join the gig economy. You know you're on borrowed time. You're making less than it takes to keep a roof over your head and that car running. You're taking a payday loan where the interest is the mileage on your car... Sooner or later it's going all collapse unless you get lucky and get a real job. And even if you do you'll spend those earnings digging out of the hole you were in while unemployed. So you'll never get ahead. Meanwhile inflation in necessities (food, shelter, healthcare, education, etc) is 4.5% but your raises are 1.5%....

. This is modern day slavery. You're overtly never forced, but the alternatives are abject poverty and homelessness. Starvation if you take if far enough. Unemployment without the gig economy is pushing 10%, but if you ask anyone we're at "full" employment.

One of the things that hurt the Southern United States was they had billions, maybe Trillions of dollars tied up in slaves. Meanwhile the north had employees. The employees were disposable. You didn't care what happened to them. Sure they were "free", but if they tried to unionize they got their heads busted in just like a runaway slave. On a long term scale the freemen in the North were better off because eventually Unions formed and got better wages, but it took decades. And the wealthy have noticed this. They don't like paying for your quality of life.