There is a purpose for casual/contract labor. If I want my lawn mowed, some basement junk hauled away, or my house painted, I want someone on contract/gig to do something for me, but I sure don’t want to hire an employee.

How that person chooses to relate to an employer (whether to be self-employed or work for someone else) is their business, not a concern of mine.

However, from a policy standpoint, I certainly don’t want to prohibit them from being a solo entrepreneur or similar.

So, there’s a reason to allow contract work, even with individuals. Whether you extend that to Uber transportation or to Uber’s new business is a fair question, but “employ them” is not the universal answer to Uber and non-Uber.

The current situation is that even a government that wants to work for the majority of people is too scared to go against a corporation like Uber, or simply doesn't have the means (means being political capital as well as skills within the civil service).

Building that means is a project that lasts beyond election cycles, and needs one elected government to not immediately undo the work of a previous one.

When you sign on you select the company you work for and have access to group chats, forums (by region?). If a thread gets going on striking, the word can be put out on the app and all Uber drivers, just to pick an arbitrary example, refuse to accept calls for one day (again, as an example).

It would be an interesting experiment and tell us a little more about the world and economy we live in today.

Money - directly towards politicians.

Money - buys them the best lawyers for when they sit down with the government lawyers.

Money - allows them to move faster than the legal system can catch up.

Money - they focus all of their resources on doing the things we'd prefer they didn't, governments have other things to do deal with.

I did not know this. Is this verifiable? I thought the whole reason Uber and other “gig” businesses work is because they can pay piecemeal and not have people classified as employees. There were multiple high profile court cases and even attempts to legislate that Uber drivers are employees, but I believe in the US they are still independent contractors, hence they can work for whoever they want, whenever they want.

That argument goes both ways:

Should your employer be able to have you on an exclusive contract with a salary so low that you cannot pay your own bills?

Probably not.

The fallacy in your argument is that you're assuming that people like to work. They don't, they do it out of necessity.

But what is your apparent assumption that Uber, dorodash, or any other employer owns your body or time. Frankly, that's both a holdover and also a bit of a crack that reveals that what we call slavery, is really just exploitation and abuse and it comes in many forms. Today it takes many other forms, but one of them is what you may unintentionally have internalized, that when you are "working for someone" you are effectively owned by them and you are not free to do anything but what you are told when you are "on the clock", like a part time slave, only with worse benefits.

It's an odd characteristic of seemingly all of humanity to varying degrees, but for whatever reason, one set of humans is not only exploited, but often even participates in their own exploitation (be it the "gig-economy" types or the corporate cheerleader types) while another set of humans enjoy the fruits of that exploitation and facilitate it with things like abusive, narcissistic manipulative language like "freedom of choice" and "democracy" and "gig-economy" and any other of the manipulative, word-smithed terms and buzzwords the PRopaganda people come up with.

When the company fights hard & dirty for decades to classify you as a contractor to externalize the majority of the costs in their business model? Yes.

An Uber driver doing DoorDash or Lyft between Uber work would be working for a direct competitor, whereas an Uber driver doing errands that require a car from TaskRabbit would not be working for a direct competitor.

Tech fascinated me as a kid—and, because of my age, we're talking Apollo-era tech, promises of a moon base, the introduction of the Metric system is U.S. schools, elementary school libraries full of science books for kids on chemistry, electricity, model rocketry, etc.

I have come around to see, as I get older, that tech for tech's sake is often a hollow thing. Its biggest cheerleaders are (of course) the ones that stand to make a lot of money from it.

Change for change's sake follows in stride—is disruptive, unasked for, often benefits a few.

I dislike my modern cynicism on tech but it has also served me well.

We are very close to it.

I can't quite square people seriously believing such things, it seems like it must be wishful thinking crossed with denial. We have more than 200 years of technology taking away the hard and dangerous jobs and it hasn't been playing out that way at all, so why should the latest kind of automation have a dramatically different effect on society?

A hydraulic excavator can do the work of dozens of men with shovels, dozens of times faster too, but that hasn't lead to easy lives of luxury for the sort of men that would have been breaking their backs with shovels. They all had to get other manual labor jobs, because they weren't the capital that got to own and profit from the new machines. The best we can hope for is that when all the women manually spinning thread get replaced by factories, that at least some of them will get to have new factory jobs and the rest will at least be offset by society at large benefiting from clothing so cheap that even the poorest people can own more than one outfit.

That didn't happen at any previous industrial revolution step either. Instead work for humans became more mechanical and soul-crushing.

Farmers ended up having to work on some factory line for 12 hours. Small store owners and employees were turned into huge chain cogs. People "freed" from household work, were send to the cubicle.

The wealthy people don't like that, why would they and since they have a disproportionate amount of power via their wealth they oppose it successfully.

They'll keep the bread and circuses going and keep refining what is the minimum amount of bread they can get away with until they cross the line and then things get whacky for a bit, it resets and then they start taking the bread away again.