If you offer people stable work, with good pay and benefits, pension, healthcare (in the US), you won't have a shortage of applicants believe me. This myth being spread that people want flexible work is perpetuated by the people who benefit.
Talk to an Uber driver. If they aren't scared that you are a spy from corporate, they will tell you what they really think.
The ability to earn some money with zero notice is awesome. The minute you start requiring contracts and working hours, and qualifications, and exclusivity, it has suddenly made life dull. Suddenly you're a drone wearing a suit working 9-5 for 50 years then retiring when you're too old to fulfil your dreams. No thanks!
It really saved me back then, and if somebody had tried to tell me that they wanted to prohibit me from doing that, because the work I was doing didn’t meet their standards, I would have told them to take a hike. What happens when you try to forcibly impose those standards isn’t that everybody’s working conditions/arrangements magically improve. What happens is the price of labor goes up, the demand for labor goes down, and you end up taking work away from people that were happy to do it, and leaving them with no work at all.
As far as I can tell, no one is talking about prohibiting temporary contract work.
What most people seem to be saying is, you shouldn't be able to pretend that people are temporary contract workers when they really aren't.
Do you think that:
(a) It is self-evident that Uber and Walmart workers are reasonably compensated, because they agreed to their wages in a market transaction; or
(b) There are structural forces that compel Uber and Walmart workers to capture as income an unreasonably low fraction of the benefit they provide the market; or
(c) Something else
Your point b also invokes that reasonableness opinion, but makes a further mistake of presuming that remuneration is determined by value provided (by whatever metric it is that you think that should be judged). Wages are set by supply and demand, for a price to be high there needs to be more people wanting to buy something than there is people wanting to sell it. That is why unskilled labor is worth so little. It’s also why oxygen (incredibly valuable) is free, and why some bureaucrats (incredibly not valuable) can end up being paid quite a lot.
But you’re right. That is not a relevant question. What you’re talking about is taking jobs away from people, and replacing them with nothing.
The anti-contractor laws don’t just affect low paid jobs either. Which is why every Vox journalist in California was so surprised to see themselves laid off after AB5 passed. Thankfully I don’t live in a jurisdiction that’s considering such legislation, but if I did, I would leave. I’ve been on an endlessly revolving short term contract with the same organisation for nearly 3 years now. They would love it if I didn’t have the option to contract, because I earn at least 3x what an equivalent permanent team member would. I’m sure they would be very grateful if somebody were to prohibit me from engaging in such an arrangement with them.
>They would love it if I didn’t have the option to contract, because I earn at least 3x what an equivalent permanent team member would. //
Who is suggesting you can't contract work? If the law stated that contract workers total pay could not be less than the gross business cost of employee workers (+ a percentage?) would that somehow affect you negatively?
That aside: You're seriously going to argue people who can't afford basic healthcare shouldn't be helped financially because you might lose your 3x good income (~$300,000 would be triple the median California programmers wage, apparently)?
Of course people would choose a stable, easier, and better paying job opposed to gig work. That job doesn't exist for everyone.