The delivery rider chooses when to open the app. That sounds like freedom. Yet the same app may set the fare, decide which order appears, measure acceptance and suspend an account. Which side of the relationship matters more?
“Gig economy” is a broad label for paid tasks arranged one at a time, often through a digital platform. The International Labour Organization distinguishes work performed online, such as design or data tasks, from location-based services such as delivery and transport.¹ A student taking a few weekend jobs and a parent relying on deliveries for their main income may use the same platform but face very different stakes. Any verdict on gig work has to begin there.
The appeal of a switch
Flexible entry is a genuine attraction. A person may fit paid work around study, care or another job without asking a manager for a fixed rota. Online platforms can connect a specialist to clients far away; local apps can create demand that is hard for a new self-employed worker to find alone. The ILO's global report describes both opportunities and difficulties across a wide range of platform work.¹
The freedom has limits. An app can change its pricing or rules without the worker having much say. It can direct jobs towards some workers, use ratings to discipline behaviour and make decisions through systems whose logic is hard to challenge. The worker may be free to log off, but not to negotiate the price of the next trip. This is why “flexible” and “independent” are not synonyms.
There is also a difference between gross receipts and take-home pay. A driver or courier may pay for fuel, a vehicle, insurance, repairs, a phone and unpaid time between jobs. A freelancer may spend hours finding clients and correcting disputed work. A headline fee for a task says little until these costs and waiting times are counted.
Who is the boss?
Britain's employment framework distinguishes employees, workers and genuinely self-employed people. Workers have rights including the National Minimum Wage and paid holiday, while employees generally have additional protections.² The category depends on how a relationship actually operates. Government guidance stresses that businesses cannot simply choose a status by writing it into a contract.³
The landmark UK Supreme Court decision in Uber BV v Aslam illustrates the point. In 2021 the court upheld a finding that drivers in the case were “workers”. The judgment examined the platform's control over terms, fares and drivers' ability to build relationships with passengers.⁴ It did not announce that every person using any app is automatically an employee. It showed that a digital interface can exercise familiar forms of managerial power.
Government guidance updated in 2026 explicitly discusses control through an app when assessing worker status.⁵ The practical questions are concrete: who sets the price, can the person refuse work without penalty, can they send a substitute, and can they build an independent customer base? Answers differ between platforms and may change as business models change.
Legal status matters because it changes who carries risks. Paid holiday and minimum-wage rules are not decorative benefits; they affect whether someone can take a break or absorb a quiet week. Yet enforcing rights can be difficult for someone who fears losing access to work or cannot see how an automated decision was made.
A marketplace with hidden rules
Platforms often describe themselves as matchmakers between customers and independent suppliers. That description captures part of their function, but the matchmaker also designs the market. It decides how jobs are displayed, what data workers see and which performance measures matter. A star rating looks like neutral customer feedback until an unexplained low score affects someone's livelihood.
Good platform design can make decisions contestable. Workers should be able to understand why access has been restricted, correct errors and see how earnings are calculated. Customers, too, benefit from knowing whether the fee they pay supports decent conditions. Transparency will not resolve every dispute, but opaque systems make fair treatment harder to establish.
Public debate sometimes treats all gig workers as trapped or all of them as entrepreneurs. The ILO's research, based on interviews and surveys across multiple countries and sectors, shows why both stereotypes fail.¹ People value flexible entry and may also face low or uncertain income, competition and limited bargaining power. The question is how flexibility is distributed: who can choose and who must wait.
The same work, different bargain
Consider two people doing the same delivery route. One treats it as occasional extra income, owns a bicycle and can refuse every wet evening. The other has a vehicle loan to repay and needs a minimum weekly income. The first may experience flexibility; the second may experience a permanent pressure to accept work whenever it appears. Neither account is false. The platform's design interacts with the worker's savings, obligations and alternatives.
Nor should older forms of casual work be romanticised. Short-term jobs existed long before phones. What is new is the scale and speed with which a platform can allocate tasks, measure performance and change conditions across many workers at once.¹
Freedom with a floor beneath it
Gig work is at its best when the worker can genuinely choose tasks, understand pay and keep the rewards of efficiency without being denied basic protections. It becomes precarious when the risks of fluctuating demand, accidents and illness sit largely with the individual while the platform retains control over the market.
There is no single rule that makes every kind of platform work fair. The British legal test already asks what happens in practice rather than relying on a job title.⁵ That is a useful principle beyond the courtroom. Ask not merely whether someone can switch the app off, but what power they have while it is on.