The Gig Economy Is Just Old Exploitation

Innovation In Marketing Only

The gig economy gets sold as something new. Flexibility. Be your own boss. The future of work. Disruption.

It's not new. Any of it.

What Uber, DoorDash, TaskRabbit, and their countless imitators actually did was rediscover piece-work, the oldest and most exploitative form of labor arrangement, and put an app on top of it. That's it. That's the innovation.

Pay per task. No guaranteed hours. No benefits. No job security. No collective bargaining. The worker assumes all risk. The company assumes none.

This is what labor looked like before the labor movement. Before minimum wage laws, before overtime requirements, before workplace safety regulations, before unemployment insurance. The gig economy isn't the future of work. It's the past of work, resurrected.

The Piece-Work Parallel

Piece-work dominated certain industries in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Garment workers got paid per item. Factory workers got paid per unit. Miners got paid per ton.

The problems were obvious. No guaranteed income. Race-to-the-bottom competition among workers. No incentive for employers to provide safe conditions (injured workers could just be replaced). Complete instability.

Workers fought to change this. They organized. They struck. They demanded, and eventually won, hourly wages, predictable schedules, employer-provided benefits. These weren't gifts. They were concessions extracted through collective power.

And now we're undoing all of it. Voluntarily. Because it's called something different.

A driver getting paid per ride isn't meaningfully different from a seamstress getting paid per shirt. The technology is different. The economic structure is identical.

The "Independent Contractor" Fiction

The legal trick that makes this possible is worker misclassification. Gig companies claim their workers aren't employees; they're "independent contractors." Free agents. Entrepreneurs.

This matters because employment law only applies to employees. Minimum wage? Doesn't apply to contractors. Overtime? Doesn't apply. Workers' compensation? Doesn't apply. Unemployment insurance? Doesn't apply. The right to organize under labor law? Doesn't apply.

By calling workers contractors, gig companies exempt themselves from a century of labor protections. That's the whole business model. Not the app. Not the algorithm. The classification.

And the classification is fiction. These workers don't set their own rates. They can't negotiate terms. They can be "deactivated" (fired) at any moment for any reason. They're told when to work, where to work, how to work. By every meaningful measure, they're employees.

But the law (so far) lets companies pretend otherwise. So they do.

The Flexibility Myth

You'll hear that workers choose gig work for the flexibility. And that's true for some people. Students, parents with caregiving responsibilities, people with other jobs: for them, the ability to work irregular hours has genuine value.

But let's be honest about what flexibility means here.

It means the company has no obligation to you. It means they can change the pay structure whenever they want. It means they can flood your market with new workers whenever they want. It means you have no recourse when the algorithm decides you're making too much money and adjusts accordingly.

Flexibility for workers would be employees with control over their schedules. What the gig economy provides is flexibility for companies to avoid all the costs and obligations of employment while still getting labor on demand.

The flexibility is real. It's just not for you.

Who Benefits

The gig economy didn't emerge because workers demanded it. It emerged because venture capital saw an opportunity.

The opportunity was labor arbitrage. Take work that used to be done by employees with benefits and protections, and have it done instead by contractors without those things. Pocket the difference. Call it disruption.

The companies that pioneered this model lost money for years. Billions of dollars. They subsidized rides and deliveries below cost, funded by investor money, to establish market dominance and drive out traditional competitors. The goal was never to build a sustainable business; it was to become too big to fail, too embedded to regulate.

And it worked. Sort of. The companies still mostly lose money (or barely break even). But they've successfully created a new category of work that falls outside traditional labor protections. They've normalized the idea that workers should bear all the risks of running a business while receiving none of the benefits of employment.

Who actually benefited? Investors who got in early and got out. Executives with stock options. Consumers who got temporarily subsidized services. Not the workers.

The App Is A Distraction

There's nothing about digital technology that requires worker exploitation. You could build an app that connects riders with drivers where the drivers are employees. You could build a platform that matches customers with service providers who have full labor protections.

The app is neutral. The business model is the choice.

Gig companies chose to classify workers as contractors not because the technology demanded it, but because it was more profitable. They chose to externalize costs onto workers not because of innovation, but because they could.

The app is a distraction. It makes the arrangement feel modern, technological, inevitable. It obscures the fact that the underlying economic relationship is centuries old.

The Regulatory Response

Governments are slowly catching on. Some jurisdictions have passed laws requiring gig companies to treat workers as employees (or at least provide some benefits). Companies respond by threatening to leave those markets, funding ballot initiatives to overturn the laws, or simply ignoring regulations and daring enforcement.

The game is delay. Every year the current arrangement continues is another year of profit extracted from workers who should have had protections. Even if regulations eventually catch up, the money has already been made.

And workers have been disciplined. A generation now thinks of precarity as normal. Thinks of benefits as luxuries. Thinks of job security as something for other people, in other industries, in other eras.

That normalization might be the gig economy's most lasting contribution.

What's Actually New

The gig economy did bring something new, but it's not what the companies claim.

What's new is the scale and sophistication of surveillance. The apps track everything. Location. Speed. Ratings. Acceptance rates. The algorithm knows exactly how workers behave and uses that information to optimize extraction.

What's new is the atomization. Gig workers rarely see each other, rarely interact, rarely develop the relationships that make collective action possible. This is by design. Isolated workers are compliant workers.

What's new is the rhetoric. The language of entrepreneurship and flexibility papers over what is actually a return to pre-labor-law conditions. Workers are told they're CEOs of their own businesses when they're actually piece-workers for a company that refuses to admit they exist.

The exploitation is old. The packaging is new.

The Path Forward

Gig workers can organize. It's harder (deliberately so) but not impossible. Worker centers, informal associations, coordinated actions during surge periods. Some victories have happened.

Regulation can help. Laws requiring employee classification, portable benefits systems, sectoral bargaining that covers all workers in an industry regardless of classification. These exist in some places. They could exist in more.

But the most powerful change would be a shift in perception. Recognizing the gig economy for what it is: not innovation, but regression. Not the future, but a discredited past wearing new clothes.

The labor movement spent a century fighting the conditions the gig economy has recreated. The fight isn't over. It's just been forced to start again.

And it will be won the same way it was won before: by workers recognizing their collective power and using it. No app can stop that. No algorithm can prevent it. The only question is how long it takes, and how much exploitation happens in the meantime.