Despite struggling to turn a profit over the years, ride-hailing service and Uber competitor Lyft decided recently to take itself public. As reported by CBS, Lyft was aiming for an initial price of $72 per share. Given that the company is going public with 31 million shares to sell off, that could have put Lyft's market capitalization at around $24 billion - a tidy sum for a company that still finds itself buried in debt.
As of writing, Lyft has indeed gone public, and its stock price has far exceeded early estimates: when shares begin to sell, their price leaped up to roughly $87 each, which temporarily bumped Lyft's market cap up to $30 billion.
While Lyft's executives are likely pretty pleased with the relative success of their IPO thus far, some of the company's San Francisco and San Diego-based drivers are anything but.
As reported by The Verge, hundreds of drivers in both of these locations have gone on strike to protest the IPO, and what they feel is unfair compensation for the effort they put into their jobs.
Lyft and Uber drivers have tried – and failed – on multiple occasions to be reclassified as full-time employees instead of freelance workers. This reclassification would entitle them to benefits such as health care and paid time off.
It remains to be seen whether or not this strike (which is relatively small in scale) will finally lead to Lyft giving drivers those benefits, but so far, it doesn't seem to have had much of an impact. However, that could change in the future as the news spreads - the last thing Lyft wants right now is bad publicity.