'Job' is about continuity and stability; the ability to make commitments to regular expenditures required to maintain a particular standard of living. Highly variable income is bad for this. That's one of the reasons why people push back so hard on the "gig economy"; it brings the fear that you might not be able to make rent/mortgage next month and therefore lose everything you've built up.
And yet. I'm disciplined with money. I'm not impulsive or indulgent. I can build a mean spreadsheet. Put all this together and still the uncertainty and variability is stressful. Running down a savings account without knowing when it will be refilled is something that's always in the back of your mind, eating away at you. You build your life to fit an average yearly income - children, vehicles, rent, gym memberships, etc. When that average yearly income is NEVER guaranteed, you always suspect that this time you won't pull through, and your life will start falling apart, piece by little piece.
I can only imagine how brutal it must be for those whose skills are not as in demand or as remunerative as ours.
And the higher up the scale you go, the less likely "company owner" is to be a single individual who only owns one company. It will be people or investment bodies with diversified portfolios. The most stressed person is probably the small business owner who is genuinely at risk if it fails.
The "precaritisation" is about pushing as much risk as possible onto those least able to bear it, reversing the expansion of risk-sharing that is the social insurance and the "welfare state".
Not many humans thrive under high-stakes insecurity. We'll have a pathological (and cruel) society if it's built on the pretense that everyone's an entrepreneurial whirlwind who gets a kick out of doing it without a safety net.
Much like the flint knapper gave way to unionized mechanized professional stone masons, 'uber for flint knappers' will likely give way to 'uber for professional stone masons' sooner or later.
Note that drivers, hostel workers, and flint knappers don't make much money because of supply and demand for the skill. Stone masons, however, make about 50% to 100% more than the median income, not as much as programmers, but not bad.
If "uber for" can scale to higher skill level tasks, which is an open question, then there's no need to assume the jobs will always be low skilled and low pay. The article avoids this issue. Its "well known" that only a small amount of the population live in architectural/geographical areas where they can become gig drivers, aside from anecdotes. Its possible 99% of professional stone masons will remain unaffected by an uber-for-stonemasons which only scales commodity style in incredibly fast growing wealthy cities and otherwise doesn't work.
Maybe freedom was something that fitted a particular phase of our civilization development and it just will fade away?
Bear with me, I mean that's the way slave owners would have wanted slaves to think in the 18-19th century. And I think enterprises (job owners or salaried slave owners) always try to get away with paying as little as they can, and increasing their margins regarding salaries as much as they can -- which is were this pressure in jobs comes from.
Maybe not that much in the IT sector yet, but in most part of services and manufacturing, yes.