One of the major innovations over the last decade has been the widespread adoption (and creation of the term) of Gig Work. Starting with Uber, and expanding across the tech world and increasingly now into other, more traditional, sectors, this concept has allowed companies to effectively eliminate enormous chunks of their labor costs.
This is not a new concept; contract workers have been around for as long as paid work has existed, however, very rarely have companies used it on the scale that we now see. Even more importantly, they have never gone to such effort to convince workers, and society at large, that it is actually to their benefit to work in this structure (notice the rebrand from the loaded term "contract" or "temp worker" to "Gig" worker).
Why this is important is it allows companies to push all the costs of employees onto society at large. Companies no longer have to provide any benefits (medical, retirement, PTO, etc), pay full employee payroll taxes, spend money on the bureaucracy that simply comes from having a large people organization, and most importantly, have the flexibility to cut gig workers with no recourse and no protection for said gig workers. This lack of stability, in particular, denies these workers the ability to plan, invest in their immediate community (through participation, investment in homes, etc), and create a stable life for themselves and their dependents, resulting in a permanent itinerant existence. Thus, all associated costs of employment, as well as related societal benefits, are transfered to society.
This cost reassignment are key to these company's business model.(1) No truer is this proved than when California attempted to force Ride-share and Food Delivery companies to reclassify their gig workers as employees. California passed State Statue AB5 in 2019, forcing these companies to reclassify their workers. This lead to the most expensive Ballot Proposition in California history(2) - Proposition 22, with Uber, Lyft, Doordash, Postmates, and several others, spending hundreds of millions to pass it. Notably Proposition 22 serves to carve out exemptions in AB5 specifically for Ride-Share and Food Delivery companies. It passed with 58% support.
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