One afternoon in June of 2022, Mohammed Ishag, a Sudanese immigrant who drove for Uber and Lyft, was killing time in the Denver International Airport rideshare lot, listening to a pulpy and popular audiobook called Insta Empire. Ishag, a 32-year-old native Arabic speaker who had been in the United States for about five years, found the story amusing and an excellent tool for learning English. He was absorbed in the adventures of the protagonist, a young American billionaire, when a middle-aged Asian woman knocked on the window of his 2011 Toyota Highlander.
She told him that her name was Minsun Ji and that she worked for an organization in Denver called the Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center (RMEOC). The group was starting a driver-owned rideshare cooperative as an alternative to Uber and Lyft, which consider drivers independent contractors rather than employees. Drivers receive no benefits or labor protections and yet assume all the risks of driving. A 2022 study conducted by the nonprofit Colorado Jobs with Justice found that rideshare drivers in Denver earned an average net hourly rate of $7.74 – less than half of the city’s then-minimum wage. To scrape by, the study found, some drivers were working as many as 18 hours a day.
As Ji spoke, she handed Ishag a flier. “WHAT IF DRIVERS OWNED THE PLATFORM?” it asked. The flier closed by inviting Uber and Lyft drivers to an introductory meeting of “Drivers Co-op-Colorado.”
TWO YEARS LATER, on a steamy late August morning in 2024, some 40 rideshare drivers and their supporters stood in the parking lot of a modest two-story office building on South Parker Road, in far southeast Denver, celebrating the “soft launch” of The Drivers Co-op-Colorado, their new driver-owned company, and their very own rideshare app, which would be going live for the first time.
Ishag, now a member of the company board, addressed his fellow drivers. He called the launch a “monumental moment.”
Getting there had required relentless organizing, and fundraising, as well as reassuring skeptical rideshare drivers, who doubted that a worker-owned co-op could challenge the Uber-Lyft duopoly – which controls 98% of the U.S. rideshare market. It is also a software-engineering feat: Theirs is the first driver-owned rideshare app in the US to offer both on-demand and pre-scheduled rides. There were also legislative hurdles, such as the law that required “transportation network companies” to pay an annual permit fee of $111,250 to the Colorado Public Utilities Commission. The co-op argued that a local business should not have to pay the same fee as Uber and Lyft, and eventually the Legislature agreed: it repealed that law and passed a new one that required the co-op to pay only $16,000 annually.
After the rally, a dozen or so drivers gathered in a conference room inside the co-op’s offices. Most were African immigrants, who, like Ishag, came from Sudan or Morocco, Algeria, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe. Alongside were a couple of drivers born in Colorado. They were there for one of the first mandatory orientation sessions for new driver-members.
Minsun Ji, herself a Korean immigrant, led the orientation along with Ishag and other board members. Ji is a creative and tenacious community-labor educator and organizer in Denver, where, in 2002, she founded El Centro Humanitario Para Los Trabajadores, the region’s first immigrant workers’ rights center. After an academic interlude – she earned a Ph.D. in international studies from Denver University and taught at University of Colorado-Denver – she became executive director of RMEOC in 2022 and has since transformed the nonprofit into a nationally recognized incubator of both start-up and conversion co-ops.
On this early afternoon, Ji clicked through a series of PowerPoint slides projected on a screen that covered everything from multi-year financial projections for the co-op, to the ins and outs of democratic governance, to the $300 equity share required to become a worker-owner. “This is your company,” co-op board member Ahmed Eloumrani, who immigrated to Colorado from Morocco, told the drivers. “It’s not like Uber, which will shut you off after a customer complaint. Here we encourage you to speak up.”
“This is your company.”
Speak up they did, mostly to complain about rideshare driving. One driver had his Uber app deactivated for no apparent reason. Another, from Castle Pines, in Douglas County, said he drove an Uber customer to Denver International Airport recently for $180 of which he pocketed only $30, or less than 17%. Eloumrani pulled out his phone and showed a screenshot of another driver’s $100 UberX fare, for which the driver received $25.
The co-op inverts that equation: 80% of every fare goes to the driver, and 20% to the co-op, whose fares are 5% to 10% lower than Uber and Lyft’s. Nor does the co-op use dynamic, or surge, pricing; it offers a flat rate. Additionally, any end-of-year profits will be returned to the drivers as patronage shares. As Ishag told his fellow drivers, “As a co-op, we stand on the foundational principle of mutual benefit — where each driver holds a genuine stake in our company and its success.”
Ji said that fully 70% of the co-op’s members are from Africa, the Middle East and Asia, and of those, 45% to 50% are African. Many arrived in the U.S. as refugees. She told me there are over 600 Sudanese drivers for Uber in metro Denver alone, and nearly as many from Somalia and Ethiopia. “Driving is one of those jobs that a lot of immigrants can do,” she said. “Especially when they don’t speak good English. Because they don’t need to communicate directly with customers too much.”
NOT LONG AFTER the app went live, I tried it for the first time. I was at Union Station in need of a ride home. Soon after tapping on the app, my phone buzzed: “Your driver Isaac has arrived.” Isaac Chinyoka was waiting at the curb, wearing a wide, gap-toothed smile and a navy-blue T-shirt. “DRIVERS CO-OP COLORADO,” it read, and below it, “Drivers-Owned Ridesharing” (The co-op has advertised itself on social media and via the drivers themselves, who hand out business cards that display QR codes, which link to the app).
I asked about Chinyoka’s journey to Denver. He told me he grew up on a farm in rural southeastern Zimbabwe, near the Mozambique border, attended college and graduate school, and eventually received a joint Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Cape Town and Yale. Coursework at Yale brought him to the U.S., and academic colleagues from Zambia invited him to Denver, where he’d lived since 2021. At 43, he teaches as an adjunct professor at two colleges, is a scholar at DU, and drives for the established rideshare companies as well as the co-op, where he is the director of operations.
“I’m interested in workers’ rights and the precarious nature of workers.”
“When do you sleep?” I asked. Chinyoka smiled but ignored the question. He told me he joined the co-op because it spoke to some of the fundamental questions he has addressed throughout his community-service and academic career.
“I’m interested in workers’ rights and the precarious nature of workers,” he said, “and in finding sustainable ways of supporting the poor and marginalized in communities.” Chinyoka cited the co-op’s new partnership with Remerg, a nonprofit that connects previously incarcerated people with necessary resources, including transportation. He added that the co-op, many of whose members were once refugees, are in talks with refugee-support groups to provide rides for their clients, as well as for people living with disabilities and schoolchildren living in motels.
ONE MONTH AFTER the so-called soft launch in the parking lot, Chinyoka stood on the granite steps outside the west entrance of the Colorado State Capitol. With microphone in hand, he welcomed a cheering crowd of about 50 fellow driver-owners to the official launch of their co-op. “We are the drivers cooperative, Colorado proud,” they chanted.
Some held colorful hand-lettered signs that read “Fair Fares 4 Riders Higher Wages 4 Drivers” and all wore co-op- T-shirts. A few dozen supporters were there, too, some of them regular passengers. There were also some public officials who had come to offer a few words of encouragement and a handful of reporters.
Before introducing the officeholders, Chinyoka acknowledged each member of the co-op’s board. “It’s interesting to note,” he said, “that we’re all drivers: that’s where the driver-owned comes in.” He added: “The co-op empowers the drivers, because they can make decisions about their working conditions.”
That seemed like a fine distillation of the co-op’s simple but radical premise: to put its members where they belonged — in the driver’s seat.
