I'm sorry, but I can't possibly humor calling a job you're willingly partaking in a "hostage" situation. If Uber is offering them a better deal than what they were going through, even if it's still a bad one (by your standards), why should we forbid these people from taking it?
I live in a developing nation that takes refugees from communist hellholes and the gig economy is helping them out big time by providing the less advantaged ones with a chance at life, all while improving the lives of its users through the service. And it's not just good economically, by creating new markets they help grow the economy and prevent the spread of xenophobia caused by foreign actors participating in a stagnant economy.
Unless you have solved poverty in your country and no one would ever willingly work in such a job you're only causing harm to other people by strangling Uber and similar companies out of existence.
The power balance between employer (Uber) and their drivers is completely out of balance. To claim that the drivers can just ignore Uber would be false, and neither are they able to effectively unionize because they are not officially employees. As such, they cannot negotiate effectively as a group, which means Uber has all the negotiation power.
Again, I am not saying that this is the same case for developing nations; there maybe was no work and/or ability to unionize in the first place. But for large parts of the world this was the case, and Uber just “disrupted” the negotiation abilities of the drivers.
I believe we’re looking at this from two different points of views, a developing nation vs a developed nation (I’m from The Netherlands).
I live in a developing nation that takes refugees from communist hellholes and the gig economy is helping them out big time by providing the less advantaged ones with a chance at life, all while improving the lives of its users through the service. And it's not just good economically, by creating new markets they help grow the economy and prevent the spread of xenophobia caused by foreign actors participating in a stagnant economy.
Unless you have solved poverty in your country and no one would ever willingly work in such a job you're only causing harm to other people by strangling Uber and similar companies out of existence.