The gig economy has churned out more than its fair share of injustice, exploitation, and human misery in recent years. But this week it hit a new low: the family of a loyal, dedicated worker, Don Lane, feel that he was driven to an early grave because the rigid enforcement of set working patterns, backed up with financial penalties, meant he struggled to make it to vital medical appointments – this despite the company involved labelling him as “self-employed”, meaning he should, in theory, have been free to pick and choose his own working patterns.

Although such conditions are by no means universal, the gig economy has forced certain sections of the workforce into forms of self-employment they have no wish to embrace, that put them at risk of earning less than the national living wage, and which are enforced by threats, fines and a fear of losing their job.

Over the past 18 months, groups of couriers and drivers from DPD, Hermes, Uber and other standard bearers of the gig economy have detailed to us the differences between what most people would think of as self-employment and the reality of being “self-employed” with each of those companies.

How can modern Britain allow people who are dedicated to their job, to fall foul of such appalling behaviour?

The incentive for these companies and others to label their workforce as self-employed is the reduction in their own spending, with workers bearing more of the employer’s costs and taxpayers yielding lower revenues. This should, so the story goes, be balanced by greater flexibility for the workforce. The reality is somewhat different. Barely a day passes without our postbag containing fresh evidence of the exploitation being meted out to workers in the gig economy.

There is neither the flexibility nor negotiation for the workforce one would expect to see between a company and a self-employed contractor. The opposite is true. What we see is the control one would expect a company to exercise over its employees, or workers, without any of the flipside of worker protection and benefits like pensions. Further, it is this controlled workforce that is compelled to take on its shoulders the risks associated with the company that other employers carry for their staff. It is this controlled workforce that bears the human cost of the gig economy.

Not surprisingly, many of these drivers feel trapped by such arrangements. They fear, as did Don Lane, that if they were to refuse to comply with the terms laid down by the bosses, they would soon become unemployed and further impoverished. This is a risk that many of the drivers feel they cannot afford to take. One reason for their apprehension is that it seems to have become much more difficult to find delivery work that is not offered on such terms – companies are engaged in a race to the bottom; offloading as much of the risk as possible on to their workforce so they can either undercut their competitors on the grounds of cost, offer to meet new demands from customers, or both.

How can modern Britain allow people who are dedicated to their job, to fall foul of such appalling behaviour?

In our submission to the Taylor Review, which the prime minister commissioned on the back of our first report on the gig economy, we called on the government to introduce a national minimum standard of fair work to safeguard these workers from exploitation, alongside a new legal test for companies claiming their workforce to be self-employed. The law needs to be turned on its head so it is for companies to prove their workforce is self-employed, rather than for workers to prove they are not self-employed.

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With the government set to publish its response – “imminently”, we are told – these recommendations have been given fresh impetus, sadly, by Don Lane’s death. Each recommendation is aimed at maintaining a genuinely flexible labour market which is not one exclusively paid for by the enforced self-employment, and with it gross exploitation.

How many more families’ lives, like Don’s, are to be wrecked before the government extends basic legislative protection to workers who are toiling away in the gig economy?

Anything short of such action will do nothing to halt, or even slow down these disturbing trends at the bottom of the labour market that have been disguised within the record levels of British employment.

• Frank Field is the Labour MP for Birkenhead and Andrew Forsey is a parliamentary researcher