Signs of progress in the labour market. Twenty-five years ago the joke went Q: “What do you say to an arts graduate?” A: “Big Mac and fries please.” Today’s punchline is radically different, and reveals how far we have come since those bleak times. It is A: “I need a Thai green curry, sticky rice and can you bring it to me straight away?”

Deliveroo is a new business that will bring you food from restaurants – not just any old takeaway, mind – for a £2.50 fee. It is growing in popularity with the hard-working professional classes, whether they are still trapped in the office or are at home but unable to contemplate a meal from a less upmarket alternative.

A hierarchy of home-delivery food has been formed. At the bottom are your traditional pizza, Chinese and Indian. But above that we now have premium takeaway – a “Gourmet Burger”, a Carluccio’s lasagne or Ping Pong dim sum. Social stratification arrives on a moped with the appropriate insignia. The semiotics of curry allows for market segmentation and a premium pricing strategy. This is the genius of capitalism at work. Just rejoice at that news.

But what about the workers? The Deliveroo website advertises its need for drivers (of bikes or scooters) promising “flexible shifts” and “competitive pay”. In London those rates are currently £7 an hour plus £1 per delivery (or “drop”, as they slightly worryingly call it. Surely they don’t mean that literally?).

Thus something slightly over minimum wage rates (and nowhere near London living wage rates) are on offer. When they say “competitive” they must be referring to their own position in the market. Including tips and some petrol money Deliveroo estimates a driver could earn up to £3,500 per month. I reckon that means doing at least an 80-hour, 250-deliveries week on the roads, unless the tips are spectacular.

Welcome to the sharing, not-so-caring “gig” economy. It has come to this: swerving in and out of traffic to reach more or less pleasant customers in time to be available for the next call, should it come in. The food may not always arrive just in time but the reserve army of a “flexible” workforce certainly does. This is precarious labour in every sense.

The “second machine age” we are living through, with its hollowing out of middle-class jobs and replacement of people through apps and automation, is bound to bring about severe dislocation. The technology cannot really be stopped. And some of it undoubtedly makes life better for many. You can no more hold back the computers than you could stop the sun from rising in the morning.

But we have clearly not even begun to think deeply enough about the implications for workers in all this. The “gig” economy does offer, potentially, useful flexibility for some. It also offers lower prices for others. Young people can get home late at night in an Uber cab when in the past the only option might have been the living horror of a night bus full of the inebriated.

The Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter talked about the “creative destruction” that capitalism can bring with it. The destruction of failing or costly businesses is a good thing if they are replaced by the creation of something better.

It is the “human capital” – people – who get left out of the discussion too often. The UK’s unemployment figures continue to improve, and 31 million people are now at work full or part time every day – a record. Yet wages remain low for many millions of people, and productivity shows little sign of growing.

There are just too many bad gigs in the gig economy. This is not funny. The challenge for good employers, as well as for unions, is to navigate a way through all this change as skilfully as the niftiest Deliveroo driver.

As Gavin Kelly, chief executive of the Resolution Trust, wrote in a recent blog: “In time, new forms of protection and worker organisation will be needed. Just as business faces an imperative to innovate, so too do those who believe in social protection.”

In Seattle this week the city council ruled that Uber drivers could form a union. The lawyers will now get stuck in. They haven’t been replaced by robots, yet. They have a few long nights in the office ahead of them, fed, no doubt, by some choice and filling offerings brought to them by tired, brave people on bicycles and scooters.