IT was a funny way to relaunch a failing administration: to focus an economic trend that is tending to impoverish millions of voters. Perhaps Theresa May misunderstood yesterday’s Taylor Report into the “gig” economy, and thought that all those zero hours workers would welcome the right to work for less than the minimum wage. That window cleaners would be joyous at having to give up the cash economy and start using expensive online payment systems.

The review by Matthew Taylor, former adviser to Tony Blair, did of course argue that gig workers should be able to request the living wage, and that internet firms should show some evidence that it is possible to earn it. But he didn’t call for the end of zero hours contracts – far from it. The new category of “dependent contractor” seems to have been devised as a way of insulating Uber/Deliveroo “platform” operators from legal challenge over their employment practices.

The dependent contractors are not employees and can be offered work at less than the minimum wage. There’s no right to demand the national living wage. There will be some sick pay and holiday rights for these contractors, but it is difficult to see how these are to be enforced. Mr Taylor seems to have looked closely at our broken employment market and decided that casualisation is unavoidable, even though he admits that the increasing use of phoney “self-employed” gig workers degrades work and forces down pay.

The trades union response has been predictably hostile. Frances Grady of the TUC said that this eagerly-awaited review had turned out to be a capitulation to the zero hours culture. “If it looks like a job and smells like a job the chances are that it is a job,” said the Labour business spokeswoman, Rebecca Long-Bailey. Why is it necessary to create this new hybrid – a contractor who is not independent? Surely if the contractor is under the control of an employer, then that means they’re an employee. The truly self-employed are not under such control and work on contracts.

Of course, the Taylor Report does make valid points. It is true that many Uber drivers and Deliveroo cyclists don’t want a full-time salaried job. The zero hours culture cuts both ways. Among millennials, there is an aversion to the very idea of the nine-to-five, which has led some to opt for exploitation rather than submit to the disciplines, and restricted freedom, of being at the beck and call of an employer. This is a genuine issue, and arises from a libertarian and even anarchistic internet culture that shuns bureaucracy.

However, what works for an independent tech contractor, a financial consultant or a graphic designer, may not work for society. And the evidence of the new “platform” economy as it is sometimes called is simply that it is reinventing a very old form of casualisation: piece work. Mr Taylor appears to favour this as a means of recalibrating the living wage to work in the interests of part time workers.

The work is broken down into hour-long chunks and a calculation made of how much work the employee – sorry “dependent contractor” – is supposed to do to earn a living wage equivalent. This works for agriculture, where it’s fairly easy to calculate how many apples a picker should pick in an hour. But for other categories of work it isn’t . The speed at which you can deliver food surely depends on traffic conditions, urban geography and the kind of food being distributed.

But we’d better get used to the gig economy because it’s clearly not going to go away. Nearly five million of us are already employed in this nether world and the number of self-employed is increasing rapidly. This suggests a continuing erosion of both the quality of employment and earnings. We are quickly becoming a low-pay economy and, contrary to what many belief, it is male earnings that are being squeezed hardest.

According to a report this week from the Joseph Rowntree Trust and the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS): “the average earnings of a working father in a one-earner couple are six per cent lower in real terms than in 1994/5”. This reflects the IFS findings that working fathers’ earnings have risen only 0.3 per cent a year since 1995, whereas a working mother’s earnings have risen by two per cent a year. This collapse in male earnings has been a consequence, not of feminism or equal pay, but of the collapse of well-paid manufacturing jobs and the casualisation of work.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. The internet was supposed to lead to an explosion of productivity, which would largely eliminate dull routine work and release workers to more lucrative and creative jobs. The reverse seems to have happened. Productivity has stagnated, and while there has been a growth of employment in the UK, the jobs are mainly low-paid and in the service sector. Displaced car and steel workers have not turned into technicians and production managers, but have ended up as security guards or shelf packers in supermarkets.

Education was supposed to equip people to “up-skill”, but the economy simply hasn’t generated sufficient skilled jobs to mop up those displaced by automation. The rewards meanwhile have gone disproportionately to the top one per cent – or increasingly the top 0.01 per cent. This has left the state, using the taxes of the residual working population, to take on the burden of keeping the incomes of the working poor just above poverty level.

The internet used to be about something called the “sharing economy” – renting your spare room, selling off unwanted goods, making a little money from your car when you had some spare time. However, these internet initiatives became AirBNB, eBay and Uber – mega companies which have corrupted the original ideal of the web and turned it into a ruthless pursuit of market share and monopoly. The internet is now creating super-monopolies, like Amazon and Google, that are able to suck the revenue out of countries virtually free of tax.

This isn’t just the fault of the Tories – but the gig economy has happened on their watch. Theresa May thought the Taylor report would appeal to the Brexit voting working classes. But as with her changes to social care, it is more likely to antagonise them. And perhaps remind them why they used to vote Labour.