People do in fact have options. They look at them and they choose. Lots of people choose to work in the gig economy for reasons you obviously don’t value. Working Uber beats working many other jobs, as should be obvious by the fact people continue doing it. People aren’t idiots. You can fool some of them some of the time. You can’t fool many people about their own lives and experiences for long.

> The value of flexible work: Evidence from uber drivers

> Using data on hourly earnings for Uber drivers, we document the ways in which drivers utilize this real-time flexibility and we estimate the driver surplus generated by this flexibility. We estimate how drivers’ reservation wages vary from hour to hour, which allows us to examine the surplus and supply implications of both flexible and traditional work arrangements. Our results indicate that, while the Uber relationship may have other drawbacks, Uber drivers benefit significantly from real-time flexibility, earning more than twice the surplus they would in less flexible arrangements. If required to supply labor inflexibly at prevailing wages, they would also reduce the hours they supply by more than two-thirds.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w23296.pdf