Side Gigs Make Up Growing Share of Americans’ Work Lives

It’s apparently not enough for Americans to have “a job” these days—increasingly workers in the U.S. are juggling multiple jobs with multiple income streams. And although about a third are working in multiple forms of employment out of financial necessity, about 48 percent say they’re doing it to earn extra money—but even so, not all of them are doing so because they need the money.

So says a New York Times report on the increasingly large share the gig economy plays in Americans’ lives. While Canada and France aren’t experiencing the same financial need that drives many to engage in nontraditional work arrangements—likely due to stronger social safety nets and less inequality—in the U.S. workers are seeking out extra opportunities that don’t fit the traditional employment picture in a way that suggests the workers themselves are driving the trend.

The Gallup Great Jobs Demonstration Survey, which asked about multiple jobs and employment relationships, found that 36 percent of workers are “not in the traditional one-job-for-one-employer relationship,” and 11 percent of all workers are “both self-employed and working for an employer, similar to I.R.S. data showing that 10 percent of tax filers fall into that category.”

While the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that just 5 percent of people hold multiple jobs, the Gallup survey instead puts that number far higher—at 28 percent. BLS classifies jobs quite differently than the Gallup survey, so that even a person with two or more gigs, as opposed to conventional employment, would be classified as “having one job, or none.”

Interestingly, people who are self-employed with a single job rate their “employment situation” more highly than those who are employees with a single job. The study suggests that even though “the self-employed workers are much more likely to be working only part time and much less likely to have health insurance or retirement benefits through their work,” they’re more satisfied because they’re more engaged with the work they do and are also “much more satisfied with their power to change things they don’t like about the job, and with their control over hours and their sense of purpose.”

And while technology may have helped to facilitate the expansion of the gig economy, that hasn’t been the case in other countries—France and Canada, it points out, only reflect that 6 percent of the population are engaged in income-producing self-employment.

Another reason that the U.S. gig economy might be expanding so much, it adds, could be that “U.S. workers are finding it harder to make ends meet in the face of growing income inequality and rising costs for health care, education and housing. In Canada and France, health care and postsecondary education are both more affordable and financed by the public sector.”

Whatever the reason, it doesn’t appear to be ready to stop any time soon.