Now the question is whether they must own all of the means of production to be considered bourgeois? I would say no, especially in today's world, where most production is a complicated multi-tiered process.
But even if you do think so, they are still much better off, Marxist-wise, from virtually every service worker, who own no means of production.
In any case, that doesn't mean that there is no exploitation or that the gig economy should not be regulated, but it really doesn't have anything to do with Proletariat.
A farmer on a market stall can price however he likes.
Only Uber (and other ride-haling apps I suppose) forces a price, all other marketplaces the price is set by the seller - AirBnB, Etsy, fiverr. In Amazon Turk the seller and buyer roles are reversed and Turkers only accept work that pay enough for them.
I would say it's more a product of the industry they are in - transportation is usually regulated to have a fixed price almost everywhere - then the nature of marketplaces in the gig-economy as a whole.
An individual driver withdrawing his car is a resignation, or declining to do a particular job, surely? Go back to pre employment legislation times and it was pretty common to require a worker to own the tools by buying them themselves and take them to work in the local factory. The factory and machinery was still the means of production.
Consider a nationalisation where a state buys the means of production. They would nationalise the company that owns the factory not the individual workers and their tools. If someone decided to nationalise AirBNB or Uber they'd take the company and platform, not a thousand cars or houses.
It is up to the driver to accept the fare.
firms like comcast, who may be the only ISP offering >25mbps in a particular area, are the ones who get to dictate a price.
This analogy doesn't hold in the Marxian framework. Gig companies adopt the "D-M-D" scheme, where they hire a worker to produce a service which the company will sell, earning part of the profits; the marketplace owner does not enter such a scheme, and its relationship with the farmer is not considered to extract surplus value.
>But even if you do think so, they are still much better off, Marxist-wise, from virtually every service worker, who own no means of production.
Indeed, people like the farmer - owning the means of production, and self-employed or with few employees - are a distinct class in the Marxian framework, namely the petite bourgeoisie.