[5]By Oregon Small Business Foundation,
By now, millions of Americans have hitched a ride on Uber, stayed overnight in an Airbnb, funded a Kickstarter project, or hired someone on TaskRabbit to do the odd job. Last New Year’s Eve, more than 20,000 Portlanders used Uber’s ridesharing service.
By now, millions of Americans are driving for Uber, renting out their homes on Airbnb, developing a Kickstarter project, or picked up the odd job on TaskRabbit. The City of Portland has close to 5,000 Uber drivers.
For many budding entrepreneurs, the “gig economy” helps pay the bills while they are building their startups. Uber reports that more than 200 Portland entrepreneurs drive for the ridesharing service in addition to running their small businesses.
Recent research published by the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that the sharing/gig/whatever economy is growing and workers like it. Since 1995, workers in such arrangements have grown from 10 percent of those employed to 15.8 percent. That’s a 50 percent increase.
The table below shows that workers in the gig economy like their gigs.
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• An overwhelming majority—84 percent—of independent contractors prefer to work for themselves. Thus, government efforts to reclassify independent contractors as employees runs counter to the workers own interests.
• Less than half of on-call workers would prefer a job with regularly scheduled hours. This indicate that so-called “scheduling certainty” laws are hurting the very workers the promoter claim to be helping.
The gig economy is growing and the gigs are getting better. The only way it could get worse is if politicians think the future lies in 20th century ideas of having a job just like Grandpa had.
* The dictionary defines a gig as an entertainer’s engagement. So, technically, giving speeches is part of the gig economy—even if you bring in $22 million in speaking fees.