‘Gig economy’ not real – yet

In a recent column about a new approach to employment benefits, Felix Salmon referred to “a large increase in the number of people working multiple jobs, for well over 40 hours per week in total, but not receiving any of the benefits which have historically accompanied that kind of workload.”

That seemed like it might be right, but I’ve been finding a lot of surprises in employment data lately. So I went to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ website, and found this:

The numbers are from the monthly Current Population Survey of about 60,000 households from which the unemployment rate is derived. While multiple jobholding is down overall, the subset of these multiple jobholders who have only part-time jobs has grown – from 1.2 percent of employment in 1994 to 1.3 percent today. So yes, an increase, but not exactly a large one.

Maybe the problem, though, is with the questions. If you have a part-time job and make a few thousand extra bucks a year selling needle-felted miniature animals on Etsy, are you going to tell a CPS surveyor that you have multiple jobs? I know I wouldn’t say that, yet I file a Schedule C with the Internal Revenue Service every year to report book royalties, speaking fees and freelance writing income.

- Advertisement -

Happily, there is another data series that does capture such work. It’s assembled by the Census Bureau from IRS tax return data. I only discovered that the most recent numbers were released late in May because I was looking at old posts on Steve King’s Small Business Labs blog.

The Census Bureau’s “nonemployer businesses” are sole proprietorships, partnerships or corporations that have no employees but report $1,000 or more in annual receipts – unless they’re in construction, in which case the cutoff is $1.

In 2013, there were about 8 million more nonemployer businesses than people reporting that they were self-employed. This is a lot of people. What this data doesn’t show, though, is some kind of sweeping transformation of the American workplace, in a nation of 149 million employees as of May.

Job benefits and job security have been squeezed over the past few decades. Far less apparent in the data, though, is any dramatic shift to a “gig economy” or a land of freelancers. Yet.

It may well be that we are on the cusp of dramatic, technology-driven change in the nature of work. There are certainly a lot of people in Silicon Valley and elsewhere betting on this. We just haven’t gotten there yet. •

No posts to display