Much of the low skill labor were things like writing transcripts and turning receipts into plaintext. It was at a point where OCR wasn't reliable. There were a few specialist tasks.
The gig economy was very much a net positive here. Some people used it to quit factory work and make twice the income; some used it as negotiation terms against the more tyrannical factories. Factories were sometimes a closed ecosystem here - factory workers would live in hostels, eat the free factory food or the cheap street food that cropped up near the area. They'd meet and marry other factory workers, have kids, who'd also work there. They were a modern little serfdom. Same goes for plantations.
Things like gig work and mturk were an exit from that. Not always leaving an unhappy or dangerous life, but making their own life.
If it paid badly, just don't work there. These things push wages down for this kind of work, but this work probably shouldn't be done in service economies anyway.
