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IT STARTED with a rumour. 鈥淒on鈥檛 use the DoorDash app to tip your driver,鈥� a friend told me. 鈥淭he company steals tips. You have to pay the driver directly, in cash.鈥� Sure enough, a few days later the story broke: DoorDash, the food delivery app, was .

If I tipped my driver $10 via the app, DoorDash would use that money to cover her base pay and she would get no tip. If I tipped her in cash, she would get her $10 base from DoorDash, plus the tip she had earned.

Drivers were rightly incensed. But there was nothing they could do. Like drivers at Uber and Lyft, these gig workers had been hired as independent contractors 鈥� and that meant no worker protections under US federal and state law. Now that is about to change. Thanks to a law that has just passed in California, known as Assembly Bill 5, many gig workers will be reclassified as employees, making them entitled to benefits, legal protections and the right to unionise.

This is what it sounds like when the future arrives. You were expecting disco, but you got punk rock. For over a decade, gig economy companies have been promising that they would launch us into an age of smooth, post-scarcity goodness, where everyone could do the work they wanted to do, when they felt like it. All thanks to apps and algorithms that help workers find customers who want to pay them.

But when the rubber met the road, it turned out that the algorithms didn鈥檛 assign people enough work to survive. And then companies tried to squeeze even more money out of their gig workers, with things like DoorDash鈥檚 tip-keeping practice.

When workers complained, companies pointed to barely comprehensible 鈥渁rbitration clauses鈥� in the click-through employment agreements that their drivers had signed. These arbitration clauses meant all problems had to be resolved privately, between worker and company, without lawyers or union representatives.

鈥淚f I tipped my driver via the听app, DoorDash would use that money for her pay and she would get no tip鈥�

Assembly Bill 5 has taken away those arbitration clauses too.

Uber has already vowed to fight the law. Its lawyers claim that the company鈥檚 primary enterprise is . Its drivers are therefore peripheral to its business, and not entitled to employee status. Uber鈥檚 representatives also claim that if drivers go full time, everything will suck because employees have to work set hours in limited locations.

These are mind-boggling assertions. First, Uber is literally nothing but drivers. Take them away, and the app is useless. Second, the Uber app is incredibly sophisticated, capable of coordinating millions of requests and routes and fare changes. But it is somehow too hard for Uber engineers to figure out how to assign flexible full-time hours to drivers in multiple locations?

Luckily, we can do more than merely pose snarky questions about Uber鈥檚 intentions. We can sue them. Under Assembly Bill 5, the state and cities have the right to sue businesses that incorrectly classify employees as contractors. That is what California is likely to do.

The whole scenario is a reminder that technological change doesn鈥檛 always lead us towards a more futuristic culture. Sometimes, it leads us back to the Victorian era, when workers had no recourse to justice even when newfangled factory machines kept eating their arms and fingers. As we career into the next decade, this contradiction is likely to become more obvious. And we are having to call on a very old-fashioned system, the law, to prevent the 21st century from turning into a Charles Dickens novel.

Gig work has spawned a new generation of union organisers and labour lawyers. And their movement is bleeding into the upper echelons of the tech industry, too. Google鈥檚 employees have staged walkouts to protest pay inequities, and Amazon is so worried about unionisation that it has created .

Even friendly crowdfunding site just fired two employees who were trying to organise a union. I鈥檓 pretty sure this isn鈥檛 the future that DoorDash and Uber鈥檚 funders were promised when they poured billions of dollars into gig apps.

Technology rarely leads to the social changes you might expect. Even our shiny new phones and brilliant apps are mired in conflicts that go back centuries. Maybe the best way to predict what鈥檚 next is to pay attention to what came before.

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