As a retired programmer who drives Lyft/Uber, it's always interesting to hear my liberal programmer friends take the side of the "working class" drivers against the Big Brother-ish Big Tech companies. I might have been one of them in the past. I'll probably be one of them in the future when self-driving cars replace drivers. But for now... Most of the drivers who don't make enough money are bad at their job. Californ…
First, tailoring these rules for people like yourself who are retired (and presumably drive some on the side for fun / a bit of extra cash) has a similar effect to treating fast food jobs as being for teenagers working on the side when they go to school. It is both unrealistic, because most people doing those jobs use them as their primary sources of income, and encourages an attitude that they're not "real" jobs so they don't require this kind or protection.
Second and probably more relevant, the entire framework that governs relationships between either contractors and their customers / suppliers vs employees and their employers assumes that you are one or the other. For instance, in California, everyone gets a minimum of three days sick leave. That could have been setup to leave employers out of it and directly pay out something that has been deemed a social good from general taxation. The way it has been setup is that employers have to provide it. Those are basically the same (since society collectively pays for it either way) as long as everyone is an employee either directly or for a subcontractor.
A society decides that they want to assure certain things because they want them for themselves and each other or because they have decided that it is utility maximise to share everyone's downside risks. [I know that's not how most people think but it does provide a strong theoretical argument against self-insurance]. In the system currently operating in California, and indeed in most of those parts of the world where these protections have been agreed, the way we deliver them administratively is through mandates on employers. That's why we think of them as employment rights.
The problem then with the "gig economy" is that our system is not setup to deliver these minimum rights that we've agreed on as anything other than employment rights. So if we want to keep them, we can either:
-Radically transform the system in order to reach a "new settlement" where any rights we collectively want to be assured are handled by the state directly, and let the gig economy do whatever (since all work relationships will be effectively on the same terms regardless of whether they are "jobs" or not). That would mean barely any "employment rights" because if there was something we collectively wanted to safeguard we would collectively pay for it directly.
-Restrict what kind of work task we allow to be delivered without it becoming a "job" in the legal sense.
I would prefer option 1 but I am also a pragmatist and my second preference if we don't do that is to force certain relationships to be classified as employment in order to ensure that what we call "employment rights" are safeguarded.