Some of these reports and articles and also the 2017 BLS Contingent Worker Supplement raised questions about Kreuger and Katz's 2016 study, in particular that the gig economy was surging. In a 2019 report, K and K walked back some arguments. They admitted that there were many new irregular jobs in the 2010s not because of deep structural changes, but because the Great Recession and very high unemployment made workers desperate for cash. Some became "independent contractors", but that could have meant, as was reported at the time, that they were offering to clean out your garage, mow your lawn, or assemble your Ikea furniture for $10 an hour. Much of the increase in the number of independent contractors was a cyclical event rather than a permanent shift. (K and K, I believe, devoted just one paragraph in their 2015 study to the cyclical explanation.)
But K and K were not giving up. They pointed out that the CWS--like their 2015 study--only studied people's main or sole job. Perhaps the gig revolution was hidden in people's second and third jobs. They had a point. As we've seen, most people who drive for Uber in a single year are not full-time, year-round workers. For many the job provides supplemental income to help pay off debt, pad retirement funds, or surmount an income shock in their regular jobs. However, federal statistics on multiple job holders showed no significant increases. End of story? Nope. K and K claimed that the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics were missing many multiple job holders. Perhaps so. But how many?
What we can say about the gig revolution is that the neo-part has often been exaggerated. We can admit that flexibility of hours and easy entry into gig jobs can be useful. For example, you are a single parent and cannot work a standard schedule; or you've retired and need a little more money. But the big picture is that Uber, Lyft, Instacart, and GrubHub are adding a lot of bad jobs in America. Pay rates are subject to capricious changes by the de facto employer; the companies usually offer no benefits and pay nothing into unemployment, Social Security, and Medicare funds. These companies are parasites living off the fact that many other jobs don't provide flexible hours and adequate pay and benefits. But they don't provide the latter either. In some states, notably California, workers and liberal politicians have had enough, and they have begun to redefine Uber drivers and other freelancers as employees of the concerns that they work for. On-demand drivers are angry, as Bryce Covert shows in the March-April 2020 issue The American Prospect. It is also noteworthy that the March 2020 coronavirus stimulus bill, known as CARES, allows gig workers to apply for unemployment benefits, although neither they nor the companies they worked for have contributed to state unemployment funds. Does that imply that gig workers and their de facto employers need to contribute? Yes. The Uber model of the no-benefits employer has failed miserably. But more about these issues in Part II.
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Frank Stricker is a board member of the National Jobs for All Network and emeritus history and labor studies professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills. The views in this article are not necessarily those of his organizations. His new book, American Unemployment: Past, Present, and Future, may come out in June.
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