Absolutely, there are plenty[1]. A lot of previously minimum wage employees have been 'converted' to ZH contracts in particular:

* Care home assistants and other social care

* Retail staff

* Food manufacturing

* Farm labour

* Package and food delivery

* Food service industry (restaurant staff)

And many, many others.

Most of the gig economy is not facilitated through tech companies and apps like uber or deliveroo but instead managed and provisioned through outsourcing companies.

Huge swathes of the low-knowledge service economy have been replaced by these zero-hour contracts which characterise the "gig" economy. The workers have a very asymmetric relationship where the work-provider is generally free to offer or not very short-term contracts or 'gigs' while the worker is generally pressured to accept everything else risk being effectively black-balled by the work-provider.

This is typically all done through a third party provider and further increases the 'distance' between the worker and the actual service being provided. This has really damaging long term effects for both the worker and the business.

Outsourcing isn't particular new but the rate at which 'zero-hour' contracts and the wider gig economy has been alarming. It has gone from less than 1% to double-digit percentages of workers in some sectors on ZH contracts.

I believe that any such outsourcing is damaging, a worker who works for (and not even employed by) a third party outsourcing company is unlikely to feel the same pride than a direct employee, but more concerning is that domain expertise is not kept and nutured within the company but instead diluted. There is less opportunity for knowledge sharing across domains if different job roles within the workplace are not just siloed but actually fulfilled by different outsourcing companies. Having a sense of shared ownership and an opportunity for casual knowledge sharing between different parts of a business is essential for 'eureka' type moments to bring breakthroughs in improvements to ways of working or problem solving.

In the outsourcing model people are seen a merely a resource to be managed. It doesn't matter who is turning up to do that role as long as someone does.

Zero hours and the gig economy stretches this to breaking point. Both ends of the equation lose stabilty. The business no longer has stability of knowing which employees will be around next week, so is therefore less likely to invest in upskilling, and the workers don't have the stability of knowing if they'll be offered any hours the following week so lack the stability to make long term decisions.

The accountants back at head offices of course see it as a win/win. The busiess, e.g. a restaurant no longer has to worry about whether they'll have to recruit for staff at short notice because of high turnover, because it's a different company's problem to find and supply the staff and the reduced risk that brings, and not directly employing staff reduces the overhead of managing payroll or even if they are managing the contracts reduces some tax overhead (e.g. employers NI contributions).

You might not recognise this as the 'gig economy', especially if you work in an "at will" state in the USA, but in the UK these zero-hour contracts are a large part of what we see as the gig economy because it differs so much to the established rights that we enjoy as employees.

In fact legislators worked hard to establish new "workers' rights" to increase rights for workers without needing full employee rights so workers at least get some protection.

All of this also contributes to lower social mobility. The ability for someone to climb up from the lowest 'rung' of an organisation was a rare but treasured part of corporations. Many older companies have such stories as part of their folklore. But in the outsourced gig economy, what were the bottom rungs of the ladder are no longer there, and instead provisioned by a third party. There's no ladder any more, the workers are kept at arms length from the management.

[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...