From what I've seen, the majority of arguments against gig work is a combination of information asymmetry (usually that a worker does not know the "true" payout

From what I've seen, the majority of arguments against gig work is a combination of information asymmetry (usually that a worker does not know the "true" payout of such work because they haven't accounted for things like depreciation and car maintenance costs) and the idea that you can't "overcharge" for unskilled labor. E.g. one could make the same argument that a general contractor also "does not know the true payout" of their contracts since they also have various difficult-to-calculate cost-of-of-doing-business costs, but the rebuttal is that these costs can be built into the cost of the service. Something that I think a lot of these discussions fail to account for (and was, incidentally, an underlying theme for California's Prop 22) is that gig companies artificially create a type of market that would otherwise cannibalize itself into a different type of market. If one were to follow the ideals of increasing payouts to [whatever arbitrary point is deemed acceptable], the logical conclusion is that either demand has to increase proportionally to create upward price pressure - and there's no reason to believe the market would simply increase demand just because one wishes for it - or service volume has to decrease (the service becomes less affordable, meaning less demand from price-sensitive customers, which in turn means less drivers on the road, longer wait times, etc). But once we get into these terms, we run into the classic "I got mine" mentality. Then it's complaints that taxis aren't reliable, or smugness about how one doesn't even use these services in the first place. Well, which is it, does one supposedly "care" or is it really insofar as it doesn't become an inconvenience to themselves? Easier to just blame the companies for everything, right? The one group that does truly care about the payouts is drivers themselves. From what I see in driver youtube channels, they can in fact become quite savvy about how much they can expect to take home, and come to their own data-based conclusions about whether new features or bonus structures are good or not. Common themes: two [gig companies] are better than one, long term is worse than short term, weekends are better than tuesdays. And to tie back to supply and demand, gig worker supply base is highly elastic, aggressively more so than any other type of business. Uber's CEO even said inflation helps business because with rising cost of living, more people look to gig work to make a few extra bucks. So, in a way, sure, gig companies promote an environment where more workers can freely come in a take a piece of a pie (which is not infinite). The thing is everyone wants more of it and there's only so much to go around. Is setting up such a system akin to taking advantage of these people? In a way yes because it's playing to their desires to earn more in a world that is largely structured to think payouts should always go up over time, whereas the reality is that they're exposed to these raw supply-and-demand market forces more directly. But also no, because they wouldn't have that opportunity to make extra cash at all otherwise.