There’s a weird paradox in debates over what constitutes “good work”. Progressive politicians frequently slam corporations’ inflexible work practices, arguing that they make life more difficult for those with care responsibilities while alienating employees under tight supervision. We need new rights, they cry, including a right to flexible working.

Yet those same politicians can be outright hostile to self-employment and independent contracting, where flexibility is an obvious benefit. Modern platforms and information technologies have reduced the costs of going it alone, broadening access to work and enabling people to juggle earning income alongside studying and parenting. Politically, though, independent contracting is held not as a liberating choice but as a dodge around employment rights. Progressives seem convinced that workers really want the “security” of employment.

This issue came to a head globally last week with President Biden’s new rule for distinguishing independent contractors from employees in the United States. While the previous judgment hinged on who controls work conditions and business opportunities, the latest rule has six broader economic tests. Workers can be deemed contractors only if their work with a firm is less permanent, less central to the business’s main activity or brings special skills. Contractors will be expected meaningfully to control their own business decisions, their rates and to make entrepreneurial investments beyond their tools and equipment.

The apparent goal of these classification hurdles is to discourage independent contracting by introducing a legal minefield for businesses that choose to outsource work. American progressives think that this will lead to more workers becoming full-time employees, so enjoying protections on minimum wages, overtime pay and various other employment rights.

Yet there’s no recognition that raising the fixed costs of employment might lead to fewer net work opportunities, less favourable schedules for those seeking side-hustles or whole industries’ business models being destroyed. When the rule was first proposed in 2022, for example, Uber and Lyft’s share prices tanked.

The legal framework in Britain is slightly different and a case declaring that Uber drivers are workers has muddied the waters for the gig economy already. Here, too, however, Labour’s chomping at the bit to clamp down on what it calls “bogus self-employment”, eyeing up a plan to lump nearly every contractor into a single “worker” category, with only narrow exemptions for the “genuinely” self-employed.

Why is this a priority on both sides of the Atlantic? Are workers demanding it? No. A 2019 US survey revealed that 70 per cent of independent contractors cited flexibility as key for their work choice; nearly half said that their personal situations made holding a nine-to-five job difficult.

Surveys consistently find vast majorities of even American and British gig economy workers satisfied with their roles, with only tiny minorities saying they’d prefer full-time employment. Furthermore, gig economy workers highly value their flexibility: surveys of Uber drivers indicate that they consider it worth 40 per cent to 50 per cent of their expected earnings.

Yes, small minorities of lower-paid workers clearly struggle with the insecurity of their self-employment, but with 8.8 million vacancies in America and 934,000 in Britain, the vast majority choose contractor status because they need or prefer it. Only 16 per cent of UK gig economy workers say that they want more hours, for example. Trying to shoe-horn everyone into traditional employee-employer relationships is to substitute people’s voluntary judgment of what’s best for them with politicians’ values.

As Labour comes closer to power, we therefore must ask: why does the party want to follow Biden in gambling the livelihoods of the UK’s 4.2 million self-employed and 464,000 gig economy workers? The more charitable explanation is the free-lunch fallacy, the erroneous belief that workers can gain additional rights without any sacrifices on job availability or flexibility. The less charitable explanation? Well, trade unions hate independent contractor arrangements, because it makes “organising” more difficult.