Uber Is an Economic Minnow
We’re wasting our time obsessing over the impact of the gig economy, said Lawrence Mishel. Uber and other sharing-economy startups love to boast that they’ve become vital to the country’s economic future, fundamentally altering the nature of work. “But evidence of an exploding gig economy is, as they say, showing up everywhere but the data.” At the end of 2014, Uber drivers made up “significantly less” than 0.1 per cent of the country’s 130 mil lion full-time-equivalent employees; its drivers earned just 0.06 per cent of all private-sector compensation. And if Uber is the “juggernaut” of the gig economy, it stands to reason that the entire gig economy isn’t particularly large.
Nor is it growing particularly rapidly. Self-employed workers made up about 8 per cent of total employment in 2014, a number that’s been stable for 20 years. It’s strange, then, that pundits, economists, and policymakers fixate on the likes of Uber when far bigger problems bedevil workers. Wages have been falling or stagnant for years, the retirement system is being rapidly eroded, and collective-bargaining rights are disappearing. Those are the issues that need our attention, not “a high-profile company and a gig workforce that represent a much smaller sliver of the economy than people believe.”
see also finance and business knowledge
