If you’ve been looking for a job recently, you know the world of work has changed. Once, we talked about full-time and part-time jobs. You could either pull down a steady paycheck by working 40 hours a week or take up more tenuous employment with a part-time job.

But today, there’s a new kid on the block: ultra-flexible jobs that are part of what’s called the “gig economy.” These jobs offer appealing career avenues for the un-and under-employed, but their freedom and flexibility can come at a high cost.

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These gigs resembled part-time jobs with Internet-first companies like Uber, TaskRabbit, and Fiverr. These freelance jobs often rely on a company’s platform for connecting with potential clients, giving individuals a platform to practice entrepreneurship.

Reshaping work as we know it

Gig-based jobs offer freedom from the drudgery of 9-to-5 jobs, offering cherished flexible schedules and the power of self-determination. This has always been the appeal of entrepreneurship, but now it’s available on-demand, with no startup capital or risky investments required.

These jobs also offer opportunities to earn decent money on the side, with a flexible, supplementary paycheck that can help workers with too few hours or too low wages make ends meet. Because gig workers can work as much or as little as they want, workers are free to supplement a Walmart paycheck with hours driving for Uber if they get scheduled for fewer hours than expected. This means a welcome boost to their wallet that can empower individuals to increase their earning potential as needed.

Gig-based jobs are especially common in unskilled labor, like transportation or food delivery, but they’re also thriving in creative circles. Online copywriting or email marketing marketplaces like Upwork rule the world of content marketing jobs, and artistic marketplaces like 99designs are rising in prominence.

These flexible jobs also make the transition between full-time employment opportunities a little easier, offering up the opportunity for more or less work as needed. And they can provide a bulwark against low-wage, career-building positions, and companies like Uber provide an important wage-earning resource for low-skilled workers with few other options.

Effects on industries and the economy

This shift in the economy has also rippled out across the rest of the economy. These new gigs have given rise to tech companies and apps that serve the modern entrepreneur, offering software tools for marketing, accounting and managing projects that specifically integrate with gig-based markets. And these companies are all too aware of the changing nature of modern work.

“We’re at a crossroads in our economic future, and the shape of things to come hasn’t been fully established. In ten years, what we call ‘work’ might be completely different from what we see today.” said Peter Marek of Invoice Home, an invoice template site. “The gig economy can offer a lot of freedom,” says Marek, “but it’s not without unique challenges. As the gig economy grows, we’ve seen more companies like ourselves trying to help these new entrepreneurs solve those problems.“

While the gig economy promises freedom from the structure of regular working hours, bosses, and offices, it brings its own downsides as well. Since gig employees are typically classed as independent contractors, gig-based employers are not subject employee protection laws that decades of labor advocacy have helped enshrine. For full-time gig workers, the employee protections that cover the majority of full-time workers in the United States are simply non-existent. This means no sick days, overtime pay, minimum wage, retirement plans, health insurance or unemployment protection.

Worker’s reliance on the gig marketplace for work also puts them at the mercy of their platform. There’s no guarantee of hours or benefits, or even that the current terms of service will stay the same.

After all, drivers for Uber can’t just leave and start their own company if they don’t like the treatment they’re getting. They don’t have their own customers that they can take with them: instead, they essentially rent customers from Uber.

This all comes at a major benefit for companies like Uber, which can reduce labor cost by taking advantage of a population that’s hard up for stable employment. Gig-based employers carefully avoid classifying their workers as employees, paying them effective salaries below minimum wage and depriving them of the benefits according to most full-time workers.

This is largely legal under current law, but its benefit for society is less clear-cut. True, we get cheap goods and services, but at what moral and societal cost?

Poor treatment of a labor for almost always leads to a negative backlash. During the Industrial Revolution, workers resorted to violence to make their voices heard by uncaring management, which had its pick of desperate employees to fill jobs with horrific labor conditions. No market forces could make them change. Instead, it took government action to force employers to treat workers better than the machines they maintained. Without similar government action regarding freelance and gig labor, we might start to see a similar outcry among gig workers.

Are flexible jobs the future of work?

If current trends continue, we can expect to see more low-skilled jobs transition to gig-based work, and we can expect to see higher-skilled work follow the same template. The system is vastly beneficial for companies, which get cheaper, more flexible labor, but it’s more of a mixed bag for employees. True, they get freedom and flexibility, but at the cost of some of the important protections typically granted to workers doing similar jobs in different contexts.

What’s critical is that we avoid subsidizing low wages with government money. Under the current system, workers companies like Walmart paying unbelievably-low wages are effectively supported by government welfare programs to the tune of billions of dollars annually. This results in a de facto government subsidy for poor working conditions, as companies can obtain labor for cutthroat rates while the taxpayer picks up the slack.

As the marketplace has sped into the future, our labor laws have not kept pace. Fortunately, we are seeing progress in protecting gig workers. In 2015 California’s Labor

Commission found that Uber drivers are employees, not independent contractors. In 2016, a UK employment tribunal ruled that Uber drivers are not self-employed and must be paid the national living wage. And this year, a California judge approved a $27-million settlement against Lyft for drivers seeking to be classed as employees.

These are moves in the right direction, but we must continue to advance our laws to protect this new class of workers from exploitation.