Because of expanding wealth gap, more than 3 million new jobs were created serving the rich mainly in large urban areas. The question is: is this another category of gig economy jobs? Since most of these jobs have no long term benefits, how will that reflect on this generation’s retirement prospects? Associated Press is trying to give us some of the answers.

BY MAUREEN HARRINGTON—GLASSDOOR3 MINUTE READ

Article copied from https://www.fastcompany.com/90379491/how-gig-economy-work-has-evolved

“Gig.” You’ve heard it mentioned at afterwork drinks, debated on employment sites, and beaten to death by pundits. It may have a new name now, but gigs have been around as long as humans have been paid for “services rendered.” What we now call gigs used to be referred to as part-time, freelance, or consulting.

Gigs can be full- or part-time, or even one-off projects. There are gigs to be found at the highest professional levels and in the minimum wage “service on-demand” sector. The essential qualifier is that workers are not employees with benefits but independent contractors. More and more of us are participating in the gig economy, creating a robust market for the millions of work-for-hire individuals.

How many in the workforce are doing gig work? According to the Gig Economy Data Hub, a joint project of Cornell University’s Institute of Labor Relations and the Aspen Institute, the percentage is around 30%. However, Ernst & Young consultant David Jolley points out that only about 10% of those are depending on gigs for their entire income.

Gigging was originally musicians’ slang for a performance. It has come to mean so much more. Gigs are real work, sought after by both employers and workers. Some of us gig because we like the freedom and flexibility, or because we’re sick of smelling the IT departments’ lunches. Employers may be trying to save money by not hiring a full-time employee, or need a skilled person for a set amount of time. More platforms connecting workers to businesses are going up all the time. Some are highly specialized, including those for lawyers and doctors, restaurant workers, and creatives.

As the numbers grow, employers are increasingly dipping into the marketplace of temps. The gig economy has also been a godsend for legions of entrepreneurs: “A fast-moving startup can secure talent as it needs it, outsource more quotidian tasks like payroll, and stay lean and mean.”

For gig workers, work-life balance can be improved or turn sour. The money can be great if you find the right spot or barely a subsistence. A joint study from the Freelancers Union and the gig platform Upwork found that 63% of freelancers had to regularly take money from savings, while others find that they can make a comfortable living with piecemeal work.

“You have to hustle to find gigs,” says Mary Elizabeth Emory, an accountant in Colorado Springs. “Because I have a flexible schedule, I can spend more time with my kids, which makes up for the burden of constantly looking for projects. And I don’t have to sit next to some jerk who will not stop talking.”

Whether or not you can tolerate gigging, much less succeed at it, depends a lot on your attitude, according to experts. Researcher Lyndsey Cameron says that gig workers can feel either exploited or empowered:

“If you’re a first-generation immigrant expecting to work your way up and had done low-paid, low-skill work before, you’re more likely to feel empowered,” she said. “The people who feel more exploited are ones who had been laid off from manufacturing or pink-collar jobs and wanted to stop their downward social mobility.”

Academics, experts, and consultants all say the gig trend is here to stay and are projecting growth across all professions and age groups. One demographic in particular is taking advantage of the gig economy: seniors. Angela Heath, author of Do the Hustle Without the Hassle, said, “seniors are where the gig economy is headed.”

Some seniors are gigging because they don’t have enough money for total retirement; others because they enjoy work; and still others are sought out by firms looking for specific experience and expertise. Heath reminds us that the gig economy encompasses far more than Uber drivers. “There’s a continuum of gig platforms, including some for the nation’s top [companies].”

Taken from https://www.engadget.com/2019/04/24/google-work-from-home-jobs-filters/

The Servant Economy

Ten years after Uber inaugurated a new era for Silicon Valley, we checked back in on 105 on-demand businesses.

ALEXIS C. MADRIGAL

In March 2009, Uber was born. Over the next few years, the company became not just a disruptive, controversial transportation company, but a model for dozens of venture-funded companies. Its name became a shorthand for this new kind of business: Uber for laundry; Uber for groceries; Uber for dog walking; Uber for (checks notes) cookies. Larger transformations swirled around—the gig economy, the on-demand economy—but the trend was most easily summed up by the way so many starry-eyed founders pitched their company: Uber for X.

This micro-generation of Silicon Valley start-ups did two basic things: It put together a labor pool to deliver food or clean toilets or assemble IKEA bookshelves, and it found people who needed those things done. Academics called this a “two-sided market,” but to a user, it meant tapping on a phone and watching the world rearrange itself to satisfy your desires. Convenience drove consumer demand. Economic need and work flexibility drove the labor supply. At least in theory.

Now, a decade since Uber blazed the trail, and half that since the craze faded, we built a spreadsheet of 105 Uber-for-X companies founded in the United States, representing $7.4 billion in venture-capital investment. We culled fromlists, dug in Crunchbase, and pulled from old news coverage. It’s not a comprehensive list, but it is a large sample of the hopes and dreams of the entrepreneurs of the time.

Article taken from The Atlantic

Is the company destroying full-time work, entrenching us in part-time purgatory, or empowering America’s most independent workers?

In the last few years, Uber has gone through a life cycle that once took successful companies decades to complete—from start-up to upstart, from pushy disruptor to pushy behemoth, from iPhone button to cultural icon. Uber’s executives don’t like to associate themselves with the “sharing economy,” the smattering of firms that allow average Joes to sell access to their fallow goods and services (rent my empty home on Airbnb, buy my open 3 p.m. hour on TaskRabbit). The company’s ambitions, it says, are grander. But for now, the vast majority of drivers are behind the wheel of their own car. “Sharing” is, to be quite literal, the majority business of Uber.

This puts Uber squarely in the crosshairs of a debate about what exactly this peer-to-peer economy means for the future of the economy. (Like all discussions that include the term “future of the economy,” this can amount to little more than rounding up some very recent developments and projecting forward 10 years with jaunty confidence.) Are these new companies creating value from nothing, or destroying the value of the formal economy? Are they inventing new, flexible ways for underemployed Americans to work, or are they contributing to the destruction of full-time jobs?

The typical Uber driver is a college-educated man, married with kids, who is supplementing a full- or part-time job with about 15 hours of driving a week, logging 20 to 30 trips, and earning an extra $300 to $400 a week (before factoring in the cost of gas and upkeep). That’s according to a new paper by Alan Krueger, the eminent Princeton economist who served as chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, working with Uber’s head of policy research, Jonathan Hall. Krueger and Hall based their research on both Uber’s data and an online survey of 600 Uber drivers in 20 markets, including New York, Washington, and San Francisco.

The best way to review the paper’s factoids is to flip through the pretty pictures. Uber’s growth exploded in late 2013 thanks to the rise of its cheaper uberX program, which now accounts for more than 80 percent of its drivers. The largest market of uberX drivers is Los Angeles. The fastest-growing are new entrants Miami and Austin.

According to the online survey, Uber drivers are almost 90 percent men, which is still more female-heavy than taxi drivers. They’re also more diverse (defined as: less white) and more college-educated than the general workforce, but similar in age and likelihood to have a kid. In other words, Uber drivers are a fairly perfect representative sample of a typical U.S. metro area workforce.

Wife, Kids, and a B.A.: The Uber Driver Demographic

In large cities, uberX drivers report earning between $15 (Chicago) and $25 (San Francisco) per hour before factoring in the cost of gas. How does that stack up against other jobs?

To give you a rough, rough sense—really, I can’t stress enough the roughness of the sense, since I’m comparing figures from separate surveys and not including driving costs—I’ve graphed a comparison of self-reported hourly earnings of Uber drivers in San Francisco against the hourly earnings of other San Francisco occupations from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ occupational employment stats. At least in this comparison (rough!), driving with Uber is a more efficient way to make money than the most common jobs in America, cashiers and retail salespeople, or being a taxi driver, a baker, or a construction worker. It’s still not as lucrative as the average San Francisco occupation.

How Much Can You Make Driving Uber?

Before Uber: 80 Percent Working Full- or Part-Time Jobs

DEREK THOMPSON is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he writes about economics, technology, and the media. He is the author of Hit Makersand the host of the podcast Crazy/Genius.