If the entire legal profession chooses to hold a different opinion, and enforces it upon one another via their cartel, that is their prerogative. It will not affect my opinions upon what I would consider to be fair or just. Sharing my opinion may well put you on the losing side of a lawsuit, but I don't judge my value as a person according to my victories and defeats in court, and neither should anyone else.
My advice would simply be to not do business with Gigster--not as an employee, and not as a customer. They have at least one asshole in their upper management, and it only takes one to ruin a company. And further, I would advise re-examining one's previous opinions on collective bargaining organizations. If software professionals had a real labor cartel, it could blacklist companies that try stuff like this.
Your statement on consideration, for instance, is incorrect. As is the leading statement in the post I replied to. Neither of those were constructed as statements of opinion.
In any event, I hope that readers recognize that there is a lot of misinformation in this thread and seek out proper experienced counsel to provide accurate answers to their questions.
The courts system may seek out justice whenever it is possible to do so, but in my anecdotal experience, and in my exposure from [likely biased] sources, it declines to make the attempt, and seeks out simple expedience instead.
In cases where a jury may be employed to decide the outcome, the public opinion on how justice should work is relevant. If you are ever offered a potentially abusive contract, by all means consult a lawyer if you intend to proceed with it. But if you're ever on a jury hearing a contract dispute case, for the love of justice, please refuse to enforce a fundamentally unfair contract, where the party that drafted it refused to negotiate--or even explain--any of its terms.
Them hiring you counts as consideration.
I have been an "at will" employee for too long to believe that acquiring that status with anyone is worth anything at all. I was once "hired" by TekSystems in Madison, Wisconsin, to work at American Family Insurance. I filled out all the paperwork, got the coffee mug and pen, and was ready to go. Then, the Sunday evening before going to work, I got a call.... Don't bother showing up tomorrow.
So the next day, instead of starting a new job, I called up my American Family Insurance agent and cancelled my policies. That wasn't even the first time that I was "hired" by a company and then never actually got any work assignments or pay from them.
"Hiring" doesn't mean jack squat. It just means that the company has decided that it may, in the future, offer you a work assignment without requiring additional contract negotiations, pay you for it, and then report your tax info on a W-2 instead of a 1099. The essential relationship is the exchange of labor for pay. Anything I can do as an employee, I can also do as an independent contractor, and any "employment benefit" can be exchanged for an adjustment in the contract rate. So what is the "hiring" part worth? $0.
It is the height of arrogance to think that being able to say "I am an employee at Company X" is worth more than one square of low-grade single-ply toilet paper. And it is the height of stupidity to claim that you have to be an employee to exchange labor for cash.
If I were to sign that "contract", I would certainly send the other party a written "signing statement" that interprets all possibly ambiguous clauses in my favor, and mentions that I received no valuable consideration for signing it. If you can't tell me what the contract means, I'll tell you what I thought it meant, and that will be what you can enforce. If you won't pay a lawyer to answer my questions before the fact, you can certainly pay one to determine the implications of my letter for you after the fact.
If I were a judge (and I'm not even a lawyer, but I can still role-play), refusing to even answer questions about the contract demonstrates a lack of equity, and I'd take that as potential grounds to dismiss any claims against the person who asked them, that may have been based upon the document they signed, which they were completely unable to negotiate, and likely received no valuable consideration for. If someone asks, "does this mean you can claim ownership over X?", you don't answer definitively, and then you later claim in court that you own X, that's bullshit, pure and simple. If the other party did not understand that to be the case at the time they signed, it is unenforceable.
If I were the defendant, I think I would also try to paint that refusal as an unwillingness to pay for some professional legal counsel at an appropriate time, rather than asking a judge to clean up their mess long after the fact. Everyone hates it when they get snubbed by someone, and then that person later comes asking for a favor. Referring legal questions to legal counsel is simply a cost of doing business. If you can't pay that cost, and try to shift it to the public legal system, how do you justify the rest of your business?