STABLE jobs are vanishing, the old fashioned nine-to-five is already a distant memory, and everyone will be working multiple alternating jobs and contracts in the coming “gig economy”. That’s the picture of an impending techno-revolution painted just as often by worried activists as by Silicon Valley’s elite of entrepreneurial visionaries.

For some, the gig economy is the latest form of wage slavery, where tech-savvy corporations have made workers as disposable as yesterday’s congealing takeaway; for others, it offers a new era of so-called freedom where whip-smart youngsters apparently look for endless variety and refuse to bow down to their grandparents’ paternalism.

Both the utopians and dystopians in this debate assume that workers are pretty much powerless before the march of technology. And this invites strange political crossovers: Elon Musk, the nearest thing to a real-world Bond villain, shares a liking for the Universal Basic Income along with much of the radical left, because both envision a rise of the robots that will bring a silicon curtain down on any notion of job security.

Ironically, this debate on flexibility is driving many of the UK’s most successful recent labour disputes. Uber has been embattled by court cases and resistance to its working practices, culminating in London’s decision to ban the firm and a legal ruling to uphold the basic rights of its drivers. This has raised fundamental issues about “gigs” becoming a viable business model.

Similar disputes are cropping up everywhere. Only last week, members of the GMB union staged demonstrations at DPD in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee and Uddingston over the exploitation of “self-employed” delivery drivers.

What’s really interesting about these events is that the companies involved aren’t necessarily having things their own way. In an era otherwise characterised by working class defeats, here the resistance is, well, if not exactly “winning”, then certainly “winnable”. It seems quite probable that legal victories combined with public and political pressure could roll back “Uberisation”. This wouldn’t be some wonderful new era for taxi and delivery drivers. They’d be just as exploited as everyone else. But at least it would stop the rot.

A second problem for the tech-futurism narrative is that research doesn’t really justify the picture of an all-powerful transformation driven by mobile apps. Self-employment is certainly growing. However, the Resolution Foundation finds that 60 per cent of recent increases are accounted for by “privileged” workers in advertising, public administration and banking. This reflects the revenue advantages of being self-employed. More bluntly, to the cynically minded, it’s a middle-class tax dodge.

The Resolution Foundation may be exaggerating the scale of this. Nonetheless, it highlights an obvious danger of attributing the rise of self-employment to an impending new era of gig employment working practices.

Moreover, even among the precarious self-employed, very little of the recent increase has been driven by high technology or well-publicised app-driven sectors like taxis. “The self-employed are in a wide range of sectors that have never met an app,” notes the Resolution Foundation. Indeed, the largest five areas are joinery/plumbing, construction, education, retail and cleaning, with taxis and delivery finishing a distant sixth. And to cap it all off, the proportion of people in Britain working multiple jobs has fallen to a 25-year low.

I’m not denying that the world of work is changing, usually for the worse. Wages have flatlined for a decade and they aren’t going to start growing anytime soon. The demands of flexibility are changing how we work, and certainly the idea of a secure “job for life” is over, as year-to-year contracts become the norm.

Perhaps the biggest changes have come in the public sector, where austerity has forced employers to borrow ideas from the shabbier, more exploitative world of the private contractor. Even in the most staid and traditional professions, this new cowboy culture is pervasive. But probably, the greatest change in our world of work is the still-ongoing shift from manufacturing to servicing.

I’m also not downplaying the achievement of the Uber, Deliveroo and other activists who are bringing shady bosses to justice. Indeed, an unexpected result of the gig economy narrative is that it’s highlighted a world of work that’s usually hidden from political debate.

But what’s most interesting is that this politicisation arguably demonstrates the opposite of what the app-driven narrative intends to prove. Organised workers, combined with a motivated public, can stop the spread of precarious work even when workers appear to be at their most helpless. That is already proven. Companies like Uber and Deliveroo are being forced to change. I’m sure they’re cooking up new and more devilish schemes for workers to fight against, but now they are being watched, and this new vigilance means they have to carefully disguise their exploitative intentions.

These small victories show what we can do when we make work a political act, even in industries seemingly beyond redemption. Employers have spent decades – and billions of pounds in propaganda – to enforce media and parliamentary silence about our nine-to-five lives.

What Margaret Thatcher called “management’s right to manage” is now deeply entrenched in our culture. But when that illusion is challenged, very quickly we see that most people identify with the hard-pressed workers over the profit-hungry bosses. Panicked, not used to being challenged, the employers retreat.

Let’s also remember that technology isn’t inherently good or bad, reactionary or progressive. Uber’s algorithm, in public or collective hands, could empower cabbies against bosses in the business. It’s the privatisation of technology that leaves workers paralysed. But, again, that all depends on the legal environment. Sadly, intellectual property law tends to allow entrepreneurs to steal public ideas, form monopoly companies and make billions at great cost to society. But that’s because a belief in “private good, public bad” still pervades our politics.

Techno-pessimism, even with the best of intentions, can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. When both workers and employers believe that “everyone” is doing, or going to do, the Uber model, there’s an incentive to drive down wages and conditions, to adapt to a “flexible world”.

I’ve seen evidence of this. Politicians have been enforcing pay cuts on public sector workers for ages, but they justify this by suggesting that these jobs are far more secure and stable than everything else out there. “Thank God you’re not in the private sector,” they argue. “They don’t even have jobs anymore, it’s all gigs these days.” And so expectations fall, for all workers.

The gig economy has meant that people are politicising work again. Let’s temper the illusion of an all-pervasive app-driven future, because if we’re awake to what the employers are doing, we can control technology for the public good.