When you race to the bottom, there aren't alternatives.
Companies cut their costs by pushing more and more jobs to this cheaper (low rights, no progression, no holiday, no health, no benefits) gig work. They quickly out-competed. Everyone is forced to hire on the same terms to stay competitive. Very quickly it's not that "the alternatives" aren't good enough, they just don't exist any more.
Shitty gig work conditions exist because we permit it. If we didn't, employers would hire part time staff like they used to, instead of forcing everybody to be a zero-hours "contractor".
Can you name a company that used to hire part time staff and has since gone to only zero-hours contractors? I find the idea that non-gig jobs don't exist anymore extremely hard to believe.
Whole industries have switched over. Logistics, taxies, food delivery used to be done by employees and they're gig work now.
In the broader "zero-hours" employment contract sense —which has very significant commonalities with gig working— a great many major employers shed their part-time workforces because they can. Employers are dictating employment terms in such a way that people are working full-time hours and are still unable to make ends meet; have no job security, no expectation of progression, no recourse if they're suddenly let go.
In the UK, the companies doing this are countless and the scope if everything from major multinationals down to local shops and services. Part time work used to come with an expectation of hours. Over a year it built to a right to those hours (or pro-rata redundancy), just like any other employee. But now they're just worms.
That's just blatantly false. Truck drivers, taxi drivers, and pizza delivery guys are all still hourly employees. The gig work in those industries are things that hourly employees never did.
Zero-hours employment contracts and gig work both fall outside of the traditional employment paradigm, but in very different ways. The major aspect of gig work which is being discussed here, ie that the time spent waiting around for gigs brings the average hourly rate below minimum wage, is not present. Zero-hour contract employees are still required to be paid at least minimum wage for all time that they are required to be present, even if there is no work to do. Further, zero-hour contract employees are required to be on call despite not being scheduled and with few restrictions on when they might be called in, putting them totally at the mercy of the employer scheduling them; conversely the gig worker is never on call and has total freedom over what hours they're willing to work. The whole appeal of gig work is that people don't want to be committed to working some standard block of time regularly, so they can maintain their personal flexibility.
Companies cut their costs by pushing more and more jobs to this cheaper (low rights, no progression, no holiday, no health, no benefits) gig work. They quickly out-competed. Everyone is forced to hire on the same terms to stay competitive. Very quickly it's not that "the alternatives" aren't good enough, they just don't exist any more.
Shitty gig work conditions exist because we permit it. If we didn't, employers would hire part time staff like they used to, instead of forcing everybody to be a zero-hours "contractor".