Gig work is unemployment with an app

Technically employed

A guy I know drives for three apps at once. He counts as employed. In the stats he's a success story, one more person who got off the couch and into the economy.

What he actually does most days is sit in a parking lot with his phone on the dashboard, waiting. Some hours he makes decent money. Some hours he makes nothing and burns gas circling the same four blocks.

He told me once that the waiting is the job. The driving is just the part they pay for.

Waiting for a ping

That's the trick of the gig economy. The waiting used to be called unemployment. Now it's called being available. You're on call, unpaid, for a company that owes you nothing until it decides you're useful for twelve minutes.

Nobody had to fix unemployment. They just put it in an app and made it log in.

The numbers look better. The life doesn't.

Too many people, not enough work

There's an old idea that an economy keeps a pool of extra workers around so wages stay low and everyone stays a little scared. Gig apps are that pool, organised and rated out of five stars.

When there are more drivers than rides, the app doesn't care. More drivers means shorter waits for customers. The cost of the slack lands on the people sitting in parked cars.

That's not a flaw in the model. That is the model.

Dignity by star rating

Your boss is now an average of strangers' moods. A cold burger, a wrong turn, a bad day on their end, and your rating drops, and the app quietly gives you fewer jobs. No conversation. No appeal that feels like one.

People get told this is freedom. Be your own boss. But a boss who can fire you through an algorithm at 3am isn't you.

And the credentials you spent years and loans on don't matter here at all. The app doesn't ask about your degree. It asks if you have a car.

Why the hustle advice falls flat

The advice is always the same. Stack more apps. Drive the surge hours. Optimise. Treat it like a business. But you can't optimise your way out of a market with too many sellers and one buyer setting the price.

At some point working harder just means waiting in more parking lots.

A floor instead of a feed

This is where UBI, neetbux, whatever you want to call it, makes more sense than another app. If there's honestly less work than people, the decent move is a floor under everyone, not a competition for scraps graded by strangers.

With a floor, gig work becomes a choice. You drive when the money's good and stay home when it isn't. Nobody has to circle the block at midnight because rent doesn't care about surge pricing.

Less pretending that being available is the same as being employed. More admitting that a society with surplus labour owes people something other than a login.

Meanwhile

If you've been doing the parked car thing and it's wearing you down, that's not a personal failing. It's arithmetic. And if you want a little on the side without the waiting, the AI you already pay for can claim paid micro-tasks for sats on neetbros.

My friend still drives. He just stopped calling it a career. He calls it waiting with extra steps, which is about the most honest job title I've heard.