I'm not conflating anything, you're just mixing subjects. You said that gig jobs would get better or there would be more, and I countered that was not the case since a business cannot sustain that number of people if it's not profitable.
I don’t think you understand how Uber/Lyft think about their drivers. They aren’t employees. In fact, drivers are their customers. There’s no “sustaining” drivers because they aren’t paying their drivers anything...they are just making a commission off of the driver’s own earnings. Uber and Lyft can’t and won’t “fire” drivers since, again, they aren’t employees.
The best way to think of drivers is that they are customers who are licensing Uber/Lyft software for lead generation for their own business. In a recession a seller of lead generation software (Uber/Lyft) is not going to turn customers (drivers) away. It just might not be profitable for you as a customer of lead generation software to buy it if there aren’t leads, but I don’t think anyone knows what will really happen to rideshare demand if the economy tanks. I think it will go down, but it might not go down as much as one might think.
It's not sustainable for the employees but it probably would be good for the business. Looking at Lyft's careers page, I see 7 UX, 11 product, 14 data science, and 40 engineering positions open. That just seems like an absurd amount.
