Uber and Lyft drivers' median hourly wage is just $3.37, report finds

The only reason Uber and Lyft work is that there are a ton of people with limited job skills, who have time on their hands, are short on cash, and need to spend their extra time trying to make money. Sure, there may be "bored people" who do this because they're retired or whatever, but that's a tiny minority. Most people do not become part-time cab drivers because it's more fun than what they would normally do with their free time.

A significant amount of our economy is dependent on people having two or three or four jobs, and a lot of those people live in or very near to cities, and have cars. If wages improve across the board, or people move farther away from cities, or people get rid of their cars, ride-sharing is screwed. Much of the "gig economy" is dependent on similar conditions. If we had better access to jobs and a living wage, a lot fewer people would be "gigging" to get by.

Another reason (there's probably dozens) why the gig economy is incentivised today are things like rising health care costs, rising cost of housing, rising cost of education, and lack of availability to retirement or pensions. We all know we're supposed to save, but it's harder and harder to save. So people have to pick up gigs.

My partner is a teacher and gets paid well for her position, but she still has to Airbnb out a room in her home because the insurance, taxes, and mortgage are absolutely insane. If she makes it to 25 years or whatever it is without killing herself from stress, maybe she can finally retire. Except, oh wait, the state isn't funding the teachers' pensions and will run out of money in eight years! Fun.

Point is, the gig economy is here because almost every strata of people below "upper-middle-class" have been getting slowly screwed for decades. It's not designed to give people a working income. It's designed to fit into the cracks in the system - and the cracks keep getting bigger.