The Gig Economy Created 60 Million Workers With No Safety Net – The Political Reckoning Is Overdue.

You’ll see them if you stroll through any mid-sized American city at six in the morning: cars parked outside apartment buildings, their engines running, and their eyes fixed on glowing phone screens. waiting. Some have been working on it since four in the morning.

Others are wrapping up a night shift that, in theory, never began because there is no employer, timesheet, or clock-in on file. Only the app, the rating, and whatever the algorithm chooses to send them today are present. It’s a scene that keeps happening in almost every city with a smartphone and a delivery address, including Mumbai, Rotterdam, Lagos, and Karachi. It happens quietly and without much fanfare.

Nowadays, the gig economy is truly massive. According to estimates, there are between 154 and 435 million workers worldwide; the range itself is a kind of unintentional admission of how inadequately the system is documented. Approximately 60 million workers in the US engage in some form of platform-based labor.

That means that over one-third of the working population works in jobs without health insurance, workers’ compensation, sick leave, or any legal right to know if their pay was just subtly changed by an algorithm. It turns out that this occurs frequently. For years, platform companies have been manipulating worker earnings through algorithms; unlike employees, contractors are not legally entitled to notice when this occurs.

This arrangement’s architecture didn’t just happen. It was built piece by piece over the course of years of corporate lobbying and well-crafted public relations campaigns, with platform companies claiming that their model represented something truly novel—a type of work so adaptable and independent that it could not be contained by current employment law.

This narrative has been directly contested by the Yale Law Journal, which traces how persistent lobbying and public relations efforts by gig companies popularized the notion that employment is intrinsically rigid, in contrast to independent contracting. The argument for flexibility was never quite as strong as it seemed. For many years, flexible scheduling has been a feature of traditional employment, including seasonal work, part-time contracts, and union hiring halls. Flexibility was not created by gig companies. They used it as an excuse to eliminate protections.

When the branding is removed, misclassification essentially results in a cost transfer. Businesses that misclassify employees can save up to 30% on labor costs, but individual employees lose tens of thousands of dollars a year when compared to what employee status would offer.

That gap changes rather than disappears. It then shifts to the employees themselves, public assistance programs, and emergency rooms where uninsured delivery drivers arrive following incidents that are not covered by anyone’s workers’ compensation policy. The platforms retain the profits. People who agreed to drive, deliver, or work as freelancers but didn’t thoroughly read what they were signing away are exposed to the risk, which spreads subtly throughout their lives.

The way this manifests itself for women is particularly cruel, and it receives far too little attention. Governments in the Global South in particular have been aggressively pushing gig work as a way for women to participate in the economy, portraying platform access as a way around the structural obstacles that prevent women from entering formal labor markets. Pakistan’s IT exports reached a record $3.8 billion, in part due to government-funded training programs for independent contractors.

By 2030, India’s gig economy is expected to triple. The optics appear promising. Beneath them lies a more complex reality. While male-dominated industries like ride-hailing have algorithmic biases that penalize the safety choices women are more likely to make—refusing a late-night fare or a route through an unfamiliar area—women in the gig economy typically congregate in traditionally feminine fields like caregiving and beauty services. A rejection is recorded by the algorithm. The rating declines. The money comes next.

It’s difficult to ignore how embarrassingly slow the political response has been in light of all of this. The EU has been gradually moving toward frameworks for reclassification. For app-based delivery workers, a few American cities have set minimum wage floors. However, no significant structural changes have occurred. In the United States, the most prominent legislative battle, California’s Proposition 22 in 2020, resulted in gig companies spending more than $200 million to defeat a reclassification law, which at the time was the most costly ballot campaign in state history.

They prevailed. Since then, labor experts have contended that so-called “third-category” laws, which attempt to strike a balance between employee and contractor status, tend to legitimize misclassification rather than address it, thereby providing businesses with a legal framework to keep control over employees while still denying them full protections.

Whether any government is truly ready to contest that arrangement is still up for debate. Millions of consumers who would prefer not to consider the working conditions behind a 30-minute grocery delivery find the platforms to be profitable, politically connected, and genuinely helpful. Part of the issue is that convenience, which is so alluringly priced.

The total at checkout does not include the entire cost of a DoorDash order, which accounts for what the driver isn’t receiving in terms of benefits, protections, or steady income. If you’re not the one absorbing it, it appears later, in different places, and in ways that are simple to overlook. When the time comes for the reckoning, it will have been a long time coming.