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Claims Versus Cuts: Who You Gonna Believe?
Jobless claims are low, job cuts are high. Who you gonna believe?
I'm just joking. Those things are
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Approximately 36% of the US workforce participates in the gig economy, according to this https://teamstage.io/gig-economy-statistics/ This translates to about 57 million people who engage in gig work, either as their primary or secondary source of income. It’s convenient these folks are not counted. As a former freelancer, if the phone stops ringing, you’re not fired nor laid off. You just disappear.
This! Gig workers are self-employed. COVID was the first time, I think, any self-employed person may have qualified for unemployment benefits. Prior to the ascendency of gig work, many self-employed were tradesmen or creatives and as noted, keeping the pipeline full was not just part of the job, it was do or die. Post COVID may have been the first time many gig workers experienced unemployment in this sense, so any ripple effects of income loss for this cohort (due to increase competition, perhaps, or slowing demand for services) will be a relatively new phenomenon that I don’t think our current array of data systems are fit to track.
I wonder how many gig workers actually file unemployment claims or receive benefits. Wasn’t that a temporary pandemic thing? I think it is possible that the increasing number of gig workers is actually depressing unemployment claims.