Is there an opportunity to extend the gig economy as a business model to revolutionize every employer by converting employees into independent contractors?

We went through a period of vertical integration, where businesses bought up the partners in their supply chain to offer greater efficiency and reliable delivery. We also saw a lot of innovation toward disintermediation, cutting out the middleman. Look at Amazon as an exemplar.

This creates industry giants that are too big to resist political cronyism. That is, they win by buying legislation and regulations that hurt their competition, especially small start-ups who can’t afford compliance or who don’t want to operate like status quo incumbents. However, this also makes these giants easy targets for exploitation, as politicians are just as likely to sell out to powerful voting blocks, such as to push for labor rules or minimum wage raises or health insurance benefits.

What we should learn from Uber, AirBnB, and other gig economy digital services is that the cloud service component of their business model would be the perfect counter move to thwart regulatory enslavement schemes. The actual service providers (car drivers, property lessors, etc.) operate as independent businesses, and they don’t operate as employees. In fact, they are customers of the digital service.

We can extend this business model to its extreme. Imagine a digital service for human resource management, which provides an intermediation service between any corporation to workers who operate as independent contractors. The entire concept of employees disappears, as the HRM service provides administrative and labor procurement functions to the purchaser of labor, while simultaneously providing the administrative and labor supply functions that enable the suppliers of labor to operate as independent corporations.

Whereas the voluntary employer-employee relationship has been susceptible to regulatory interference due to the historical power of labor unions, the integrity of private contracts is sacrosanct, and will be very difficult for legislators and regulators to impair, as it will be vigorously defended and upheld in the courts.