> ultimately just comes down to paternalistic protection of the poor disenfranchised gig workers that you clearly view as being less than capable, rational adult humans
That is one way to editorialize what is going on. An alternative explanation is that human organization is inherently a high friction, high cost endevor, and in the case of a company vs workers/contractors, we have a massive assymetry in the degree of organization in incentives; a company is a well defined entity, gathered around the normativity of profit maximization, every stop and turn of its machinery is well oiled and properly encoded, acting as a single agent in every negotiation. Whereas workers/contractors, even though have their individual interests heavily aligned (don’t be stiffed, get a fair wage), this alignment is not by default organized, as the employer-employee relationship is a one-to-many relationship. This asymmetry, not paternalizing non-adult humans, is what drives the unfairness in negotiations in favor of companies.
Unions, legislation etc merely represents an effort in organization of the will of the “many” and to cure this asymmetry. Not saying they are perfect, not even that they work, but there is an asymmetry that gets exploited.
> Gig economy workers have overwhelmingly spoken that they like this work, by continuing to sign up for it in massive numbers
The problem in this model of negotiation is that the gig workers choices of expression are limited to “work or gtfo”. For one, given the fact that people need money to live, their participation doesn’t necessarily mean “they like this work”. Going back to the organization principle, if they were to carry out the combinatorially explosive task of communicating among themselves that they would want $5/hr more payment, or they would not work at all (quite symmetrical to the maneuver lyft&uber pulled today) it is very likely that they would get it. But “work or gtfo” binary doesn’t allow any room for expressing that. In other words, current price point is an artifact of lessened negotiation power of the collective gig workers because it is not as easy for them to negotiate collectively as uber/lyft can set the pricing.
> Getting rid of Uber and Lyft completely throws out the baby with the bathwater here.
No one is suggesting this. Not saying that the legistlation that was proposed is perfect, but the argument is “let’s level the playing field” and if Uber and Lyft can exist under fair conditions, then they do deserve to exist.
There is nothing far-left or vindictive about this. It is catching up with the innovation of exponentially scaling, tech based, loss-leader market captures. It is as far-left as reducing work days to 5 or outlawing child labor was.