The sharing economy, at heart, is about the monetization of spare capacity. So far it's mostly been physical assets, but spare time is next. Anywhere you find a poor person watching TV (or, god forbid, reading a book) there's spare capacity ready to be monetized. And, why are they sleeping so much? They could be working.
The sharing economy is also about getting around transaction costs. Ideas like "minimum wage" and "minimum shift length" can be viewed as transaction costs that services can route around.
A marginal hour's unskilled labour isn't worth very much. There's always been exploitation of this fact, but web services have the potential to scale it up.
But this future is going to come anyway, in the near future automation and centralization of production are only going to increase, leading to much increased joblessness.
The only way we can combat that is if more wealth leaks down from the top, be it through labor services or social government.
[1]: Yes that is illegal, but I would _love_ for it not to be. Cooking for one is a waste of time.
The problem is that dollars have marginal utility. The first $X you make per month is your housing and your food. People who are not getting that livable minimum are at a huge disadvantage in negotiations. They will do almost anything to get that $X. This means they will accept low pay, poor conditions, awful hours - anything you can think of - to make it. This also represents a massive subsidy to businesses that have good economies of scale.
This kind of brinkmanship with total collapse has very personal consequences. If a parent can't do it for more than one or two days a year (if that), their kid(s) may become homeless or stuck in the foster system. You should care about that because society bears a large portion of the costs (the costs are high). That level of stress causes people to make mistakes, sometimes about things you care about.
The goal of labor protections is to ensure some minimum level of human decency and allow people time to improve their lot. Aside from the risks to us outlined above, the risk of a population that is too beset with surviving to pay attention or vote should be pretty obvious.
The worst case would be existing industries that are currently bound by minimum wage and working laws, that then find ways around the regulations. But new industries that didn't exist before mostly add new jobs, not replace existing ones with worse ones.
But we're helping the poor to make their own decisions about how to generate wealth.
A-OK: Rich Americans die from kidney failure while poor Africans die from malnutrition/AIDS/TB/whatever.
Reprehensible exploitation: Rich American buys a kidney from a poor African, feeding his family for a decade in the process. Nobody dies.
Until the poor African's one remaining kidney goes bad, he can't get a transplant (nor the lifetime of expensive drugs to retain one), and his family starves for lack of a breadwinner.
Whenever you're thinking about human systems, you need to think about how humans will game the system. Essentially, you're not facing a static adversary, but an adaptive, motivated one.
I mean, two of the biggest success stories in the recent startup scene are Airbnb and Uber. What do they do? Provide a way for people who don't have much money but do have a useful asset (a spare room, a car, respectively) to make a bit of extra cash selling a service to those with disposable income.
What other opportunities along those lines are still open?