Sure, corporations are using it to reduce wages and benefits, etc. But gig economy is not really a new concept -- almost every tradecraft profession has a simil

Sure, corporations are using it to reduce wages and benefits, etc. But gig economy is not really a new concept -- almost every tradecraft profession has a similar dynamic; as an electrician you are generally not paid by an employer, you instead go out and get work. This gives you the freedom to set your own hours and tune the amount of work that you take on to support your lifestyle. I think the problem with a lot of these gig economy services is that they are often pumped by VC/PE money in an attempt to generate monopolies by over-capitalizing. If we got rid of that dynamic (which is a difficult problem) then this disappears. If there are a hundred different Ubers, operating in different cities, then gig workers are put in a better position to bargain by selecting a service to use. The cost here is that the customer is inconvenienced; a single app with a single payment system seems like a better deal. But distributing this responsibility actually makes the overall system more robust and leads to interesting solutions throughout the stack, rather than converging on whatever terrible systems have been hard-coded by the over-capitalized market leaders.