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Chozo ,

Yes, but that assumes the workers are at where they will be working. That's not the case with gig work like ride sharing. With a store or a med lab, you know where everybody needs to be, and when they need to be there. But with a gig job, your driver may be coming from the other side of town. A driver can be waiting all day for a request to come in, but if there's just no business in their part of their city that day, there's no work available.

While you can plot for trends on what areas will be busy at what times, the core function of these apps is that they're on-demand, so there will always be a matter of randomness. Sometimes business will spike or plummet in a city for no apparent reason.

The issue stems from the lack of predicability in a volatile market that relies entirely on the whims of the users. People want a service that's available as soon as possible, at all times of day, with zero advance notice. "It's 3am and I want this specific burger from this specific restaurant and I will pay somebody to go right this minute to pick it up for me". That is not easily predicted, and impossible to properly schedule for. It's a flaw in the way these businesses are designed, but ultimately unavoidable based on what users of the platform want the platform to be.

Another factor to consider is that to make it work, the service would need to cost more. Remember, these companies are generally not profitable as it is, so its not as if they're making bank on the fees to begin with, so increasing fees for the users would be an unavailable certainly if drivers were to be considered employees. But there's a limit to what most users are willing to pay, and these apps have all pretty much capped out at those limits already. So upping the fees means pricing out large swaths of their customers, which means less available funding to pay drivers. Now you're introducing layoffs to workers who were previously immune from being laid off.

It's a very complicated and chaotic situation to untangle, and one that doesn't have a simple, punchy solution.

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