Gig Economy Is Up

Automation and Artifical Intelligence (AI) are spurring an economic and cultural shift toward customizable multi-stream contract work as demand for traditional jobs are eliminated. Independent contractors and freelance workers (gig jobs) have risen beyond 53 Million or 34% of our labor force. Roughly 50% of Millennial workers are already a part of the gig world according to the the Wall Street Journal. Current trends project the majority of US labor will be freelance by 2027. Think of Uber and Airbnb growth. Just 3 years ago New York City had more Yellow cabs available than Uber and Lyft ride sharing vehicles combined. By last year, Uber and Lyft ride sharing provided 50% more daily rides than Yellow Cab and quintuple the cars in service.  

What a world! Ride sharing, Car sharing, Residence sharing, food deliveries, smartphone banking and freelance taskers. Airbnb has grown from just 3,000 listings in 2009 to 2.3 Million in 2017 with bookings growing at a 40 to 50% clip. They now have far more listings than the worlds 5 largest hotels combined. Airbnb had 80 million users in 2016 and 100 Million in 2017 and appear to have locked in many more years of rapid adoption in new countries.

There are more than 2 million Uber drivers globally (about 65% are in the US), over 50,000 TaskRabbit freelance contract workers and thousands of food delivery drivers (Ubereats, Doordash, Postmates). 

Lawrence Katz of Harvard and Alan Krueger at Princeton found that “94% of net job growth (10 million jobs) in the past decade were in the alternative job space with more than 60% a result of freelancers. http://contently.net/2016/04/29/trends/6-takeaways-from-the-katz-kreuger-study-on-freelancing/  Working the traditional “9 to 5” or W-2 salaried job is in decline.