San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Report: Traditional jobs still king as gig economy evolves
You can see the gig economy everywhere but in the statistics.
For years, economists, pundits and policymakers have grappled with the rise of Uber, the growth of temporary work and the fissuring of the relationship between companies and their workers. Optimists cheered the flexibility offered by the freelance life. Pessimists fretted about the disappearance of traditional jobs, with the benefits and legal protections they provided.
That debate has played out largely in the absence of solid data. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics last week released its first in-depth look at nontraditional work since 2005, which came to a startling conclusion: The old-fashioned job remains king.
Roughly 10 percent of U.S. workers in 2017 were employed in some form of what the government calls “alternative work arrangements,” a broad category including Uber drivers, freelance writers and people employed through temporary-help agencies — essentially anyone whose main source of work comes outside a traditional employment relationship. Far from a boom in gig work, that represents a slight decline from 2005, when about 11 percent of workers fell into those categories.
“I think everybody’s narrative got blown up,” said Michael R. Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.
Strain and other experts cautioned that the data did not signal that the American workplace had remained static over the past decade. The government’s numbers, by design, do not include people who do gig or freelance work in addition to traditional jobs, and they may not fully capture income-generating activities that people might not consider “work,” such as renting out a home on Airbnb.
Separate data released by the Federal Reserve this month found that nearly a third of adults engaged in some form of gig work, either as a primary job or to supplement other sources of income. Private-sector surveys have reached similar conclusions.
Nor does the bureau’s data reflect other changes that have left many U.S. workers with less security and fewer opportunities for advancement. Many companies, for example, now outsource large parts of their business to subcontractors. Employees of those firms will not, for the most part, count as alternative workers under the government’s definition. But they generally earn less and receive smaller benefits than equivalent workers employed directly by large companies, and they have far less opportunity to move up the corporate ladder.
“In my view, it’s this domestic outsourcing that is the big change in why wages don’t rise and why workers feel so insecure,” said Eileen Appelbaum, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal think tank.
Rafael Sanchez is one of those who may fall into a gray area in the statistics. He moved to the United States from Mexico 16 years ago, eventually settling in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and was initially able to find steady work, including a five-year stint as a full-time employee of a window factory.
But Sanchez was laid off in 2007, and he has since worked for a series of temporary-help and staffing agencies, moving from factory to factory and warehouse to warehouse, earning $9 an hour to pack boxes and do other manual labor. The positions can last months or even years without turning into permanent jobs working directly for the factories, which offer better pay and room for advancement.
“They’re not jobs where you can get ahead,” Sanchez said through an interpreter.
Economists have long argued that the most visible kinds of gig work are a relatively small part of the overall labor market, and that nonstandard work arrangements long predated the emergence of app-based platforms like Uber and TaskRabbit. (Uber’s impact was somewhat visible in the data: The number of independent contractors in the transportation and utilities industry increased by about 200,000 from 2005 to 2017.)
The report did not break out online workers; a follow-up report scheduled for September will do so. But it portrayed an alternative workforce far broader than the one typically conjured by the term “gig economy.”