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NY Times: Job Growth in Past Decade Was in Temp & Contract: Why We Need Single Payer
With ‘Gigs’ Instead of Jobs, Workers Bear New Burdens
Neil Irwin @Neil_Irwin MARCH 31, 2016
If you believe the Silicon Valley sloganeers, we are in a “gig economy,” where work consists of a series of short-term jobs coordinated through a mobile app. That, anyway, is both the prediction of tech executives and futurists and the great fear of labor activists.
.....There’s a bigger shift underway. That’s a key implication of new research that indicates the proportion of American workers who don’t have traditional jobs — who instead work as independent contractors, through temporary services or on-call — has soared in the last decade. They account for vastly more American workers than the likes of Uber alone.
Most remarkably, the number of Americans using these alternate work arrangements rose 9.4 million from 2005 to 2015. That was greater than the rise in overall employment, meaning there was a small net decline in the number of workers with conventional jobs.
That, in turn, raises still bigger questions about how employers have succeeded at shifting much the burden of providing social insurance onto workers, and what technological and economic forces are driving the shift.
The labor economists Lawrence F. Katz of Harvard and Alan B. Krueger of Princeton found that the percentage of workers in “alternative work arrangements” — including working for temporary help agencies, as independent contractors, for contract firms or on-call — was 15.8 percent in the fall of 2015, up from 10.1 percent a decade earlier. (Only 0.5 percent of all workers did so through “online intermediaries,” and most of those appear to have been Uber drivers.)
snip
This change in behavior has profound implications on social insurance. More so than in many advanced countries, employers in the United States carry a lot of the burden of protecting their workers from the things that can go wrong in life. They frequently provide health insurance, and paid medical leave for employees who become ill.
They pay for workers’ compensation insurance for people who are injured on the job, and unemployment insurance benefits for those who are laid off. They help fund their workers’ existence after retirement, at one time through pensions, now more commonly through 401(k) plans.
Perhaps most significant of all, the implicit contract between an employer and an employee is that there is a relatively high bar for firing the employee if business slumps. If the economy turns down or business slows, a contract worker is, as a rule, far more likely to be out of a job than a conventional employee.
It’s true that the Affordable Care Act has made health insurance more easily within reach for independent contractors, for example, and temporary services firms can offer retirement benefits and workers’ comp. But over all, there’s little doubt that workers in these non-conventional work arrangements carry some of the burden of protecting themselves from misfortune that employers traditionally have carried.
snip
A big question for the next decade is whether this was a one-time shift or whether it will continue in the years ahead, even with a tighter labor market. The answer may determine if the employer-provided social insurance that was a staple of the 20th-century American economy will remain there in the 21st.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/31/upshot/contractors-and-temps-accounted-for-all-of-the-growth-in-employment-in-the-last-decade.html?_r=0
Neil Irwin @Neil_Irwin MARCH 31, 2016
If you believe the Silicon Valley sloganeers, we are in a “gig economy,” where work consists of a series of short-term jobs coordinated through a mobile app. That, anyway, is both the prediction of tech executives and futurists and the great fear of labor activists.
.....There’s a bigger shift underway. That’s a key implication of new research that indicates the proportion of American workers who don’t have traditional jobs — who instead work as independent contractors, through temporary services or on-call — has soared in the last decade. They account for vastly more American workers than the likes of Uber alone.
Most remarkably, the number of Americans using these alternate work arrangements rose 9.4 million from 2005 to 2015. That was greater than the rise in overall employment, meaning there was a small net decline in the number of workers with conventional jobs.
That, in turn, raises still bigger questions about how employers have succeeded at shifting much the burden of providing social insurance onto workers, and what technological and economic forces are driving the shift.
The labor economists Lawrence F. Katz of Harvard and Alan B. Krueger of Princeton found that the percentage of workers in “alternative work arrangements” — including working for temporary help agencies, as independent contractors, for contract firms or on-call — was 15.8 percent in the fall of 2015, up from 10.1 percent a decade earlier. (Only 0.5 percent of all workers did so through “online intermediaries,” and most of those appear to have been Uber drivers.)
snip
This change in behavior has profound implications on social insurance. More so than in many advanced countries, employers in the United States carry a lot of the burden of protecting their workers from the things that can go wrong in life. They frequently provide health insurance, and paid medical leave for employees who become ill.
They pay for workers’ compensation insurance for people who are injured on the job, and unemployment insurance benefits for those who are laid off. They help fund their workers’ existence after retirement, at one time through pensions, now more commonly through 401(k) plans.
Perhaps most significant of all, the implicit contract between an employer and an employee is that there is a relatively high bar for firing the employee if business slumps. If the economy turns down or business slows, a contract worker is, as a rule, far more likely to be out of a job than a conventional employee.
It’s true that the Affordable Care Act has made health insurance more easily within reach for independent contractors, for example, and temporary services firms can offer retirement benefits and workers’ comp. But over all, there’s little doubt that workers in these non-conventional work arrangements carry some of the burden of protecting themselves from misfortune that employers traditionally have carried.
snip
A big question for the next decade is whether this was a one-time shift or whether it will continue in the years ahead, even with a tighter labor market. The answer may determine if the employer-provided social insurance that was a staple of the 20th-century American economy will remain there in the 21st.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/31/upshot/contractors-and-temps-accounted-for-all-of-the-growth-in-employment-in-the-last-decade.html?_r=0
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