... that's the problem right? The big furniture factory is good at making (cheap) furniture, but they are very bad at managing local teams to deliver and assemble and ...

IKEA (at least in most of Europe) is good at this, because they spend a lot of attention and invest in their local presence (all of their big stores have pretty okay fast-food restaurant, as far as I understand)

... so of course it would make sense to let the factory do that and let some other company focus on assembly (and last-mile stuff generally).

... but there's no competition, no ratings to look up, no alternatives, they will send someone and that's it.

... and of course this spreads the negative cost all around, everyone gets a bit more of the annoyances, but keeps costs down (yay, I guess?)

and as a comment [1] in this thread mentioned this is a bad Nash equilibrium. (the post mentioned lemons already, and of course we know that due to information asymmetry bad goods crowd out good ones.[2])

there's no price information for "respect". it used to be enforced by big brands, hiring processes, unions, trade organizations, certifications, licensing requirements. but of course assembling a standardized bed is not hard, especially if someone did a few of the same. so of course none of the usual signals apply (no certification, no licensed assemblers registry maintained by some government organization, no assemblers union/guild, and so on.)

...

the possible solutions are to open up the data for these gig companies.

or fix labor laws.

or fix social security (unemployment compensation, negative income tax).

yeah, I know. good luck with any of that nowadays :/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43563248

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons