Not so fast, say Harvard economist Larry Katz and Princeton’s Alan Krueger. They are currently working on research to document the rise of the gig economy America. From a story at fusion.net:
Katz said two pieces of evidence suggest current measures of self-employment and multiple-job holding are “missing a large part of the gig economy.”
The first is that the share of the employed (and of the adult population) filing a 1099 form, the tax document “gig economy” workers must file, increased in the 2000s, even as standard measures of self-employment declined in the 2000s.
Likewise, the share of individuals filing Schedule C tax forms to report profits and losses for their homegrown businesses is up “substantially” in the 2000s, “even though survey measure of self-employment are down.”
“These discrepancies suggest a growth of ‘gig’ and ‘share’ economy workers who receive 1099 income, file Schedule C forms on their taxes, but don’t answer the standard [government] question as indicating they are self-employed and don’t say they are a multiple job holder,” Katz said.
Other groups have confirmed this: Zen Payroll, a site that tracks the sharing economy, found increases in the share of 1099 workers across many major U.S. metros.
Meanwhile, in preliminary interviews with “gig economy” workers, Katz said he and Krueger have confirmed that a majority of those who have regular, non-“gig” employment don’t answer that they have “multiple jobs” when asked the standard multiple-jobs question, “even in many cases where they have significant on-line and other non-traditional job income.”
They do answer about their share, gig, and freelance economy activities when specifically asked about other specific ways they made income,” Katz said. “But many of them do not seem to consider such activities as ‘regular jobs.’”
Indeed, a recent survey found 60 percent of such workers get at least 25 percent of their income from gig economy work.
This report absolutely squares with what Murat’s research is showing. He is starting to write a book on the gig economy. I’ve read the outline. I don’t think my age peers will quite understand what’s happening. Their reaction may be akin to how my parents felt about their children in the ’60s and ’70s.
As Steve Hill writes at the Huffington Post:
The gig economy is just one sub domain of what is happening more broadly to the workforce, including just-in-time scheduling and other disruptions to the labor markets, whether as a result of the gig economy, automation and robots, artificial intelligence and other factors. Fortune columnist Jeffrey Pfeffer writes, “What is not in dispute is that the proportion of contractors, freelancers, and part-time, contingent workers in the U.S. has been increasing and has been for a long time.”
What I notice with some of my own children and many of their friends is that the gig economy, and the independent contractor world in general, is almost completely divorced from anything that looks like a social safety network. Healthcare? 401(k)s? Retirement programs? Extra help for single moms? Forget about it.