Most US jobs created since 2005 are not conventional full-time work

https://qz.com/851066/almost-all-the-10-million-jobs-created-since-2005-are-temporary/

by cribbles • 9 years ago

186 122 9 years ago

csours3• 9 years ago

“We find that 94% of net job growth in the past decade was in the alternative work category,” said Krueger. “And over 60% was due to the [the rise] of independent contractors, freelancers and contract company workers.”

So, not exactly temp workers, but contract workers who require less overhead and are easy to fire.

jstanley2• 9 years ago

People talk like this is a bad thing, but I don't get it.

If working for your employer became a negative ROI, you'd quit your job.

If employing somebody becomes a negative ROI, I don't see why it shouldn't be equally easy to stop employing them.

As long as the relationship is mutually beneficial, neither party will terminate it.

Danihan• 9 years ago

It's a bad thing that the demographics of the US are now such that this has happened... that most employee / employer relationships are no longer mutually beneficial.

lmm• 9 years ago

Most employers can adapt to the loss of a single worker much more easily than a worker can adapt to losing their job. And much of our social safety net currently operates via employers - things like pensions, maternity leave, healthcare, and even unemployment are tightly coupled to the single-long-term-employer model. Maybe they shouldn't be, but fixing that will take time and in the meantime people will slip through the cracks.

pjc50• 9 years ago

The employee is usually in a much more precarious situation, and usually more concerned with cashflow than ROI.

arebop• 9 years ago

It's bad because the overwhelming majority of people don't enjoy the process of finding a new job and cannot afford to spend time finding new work.

I think a lot of the talk is also due to unhappiness with the economic trend that is drawing the median and minimum incomes closer together, which is a reversal of a trend that gave widespread optimism and contentment.

kmm• 9 years ago

Because of the massive imbalance of power between employer and employee. Which is why employment protection is a lot stronger in every other developed country than the US.

dvdhnt2• 9 years ago

Most people can’t just quit their job, they have monthly recurring bills that must be paid. Those of us that work in tech are quite fortunate to have realistic alternatives. However, even many of us are restricted due to location, and before it’s mentioned, yeah we could move but we have families with children in school and spouses who have non tech careers. Moving is expensive. The employment system in the US, especially in states like mine, ensure that employers have persistent power over employees under the guise of “right to work”.

jeffdavis• 9 years ago

Workers are usually more efficient when they concentrate on one job full time. But that leaves them exposed to any disruption of that one job.

Also, many employers expect contractors to be always available, or available full time for long stretches, but that makes it impossible to diversify their income.

So it can become very one-sided. A possible answer would be to make it normal for employees to have contracts with several employers at once, but that can create conflicts of interest in a lot of professions, and would make things like IP very messy.

s73ver_2• 9 years ago

Because we don't like looking at people as purely numbers. Especially when those people are dependent upon their job to be able to pay rent and buy food.

notsohugedeal22• 9 years ago

Exactly why we need universal healthcare in the US

It’s something every worker should be fighting tooth and nail for

It would go a long way to breaking up the neoliberal corporate hegemony

Sadly, and regardless of education and political leanings, Americans seem in love with a fictional account of the countries history. That it was all great 50 yrs ago without universal healthcare (when they were kids and not really paying attention) so of course it’s just fine to keep it that way.

I encounter people of all ages and backgrounds with that notion kicking about, every day. Having lived and traveled the world, Americans are unique in their ignorance that the world was just as corrupt a generation ago.

Now let’s go watch some TVLand and chill

rtx• 9 years ago

Government should have its own infra and hire medical professionals. They should leave the private sector alone.

dmix4• 9 years ago

Americans seem in love with a fictional account of the countries history.

This shouldn't be about historical narratives or ideology, that's largely why public health insurance is dead-on-arrival in US politics. Both sides are terribly ideological about it and unrealistic as a result.

The healthcare industry is already the most heavily regulated of all industries in the US. Saying it's been held back from government intervention is equally a myth as the US modern history as a free-market friendly place is a myth.

This debate should be about whether certain market niches make the more sense as public entities. NOT as an example of "free markets" failing as a general rule and trying to sell the idea "you just need to accept that government knows best" (I'm paraphrasing).

Rather it should be sold as an exception to the rule. The simple fact is government should not be in the vast majority of industry. But healthcare (specifically health insurance) has many unique and perverse incentives making it poorly suited for markets and the public alternative offers plenty of benefits to a society, including a capitalist society. Healthy workers are good workers, small business is less burdened with expensive healthcare packages, the morality of treating a seriously sick person who can't work then billing their family $10k, etc, etc.

I believe there is still a good argument to be made in favour of public health insurance without alienating those who put their trust in markets. It's a unique exception and is already far from operating as a free market in the US. So why not bite the bullet and entirely subsidize it for everyone? That is a much smaller ask than the typical democrat "corporations are evil" pitch on this matter.

Messaging is important.

ThomPete3• 9 years ago

You need to define what you mean with universal and what you mean with healthcare. Does it mean ex that you can't have private insurance and private hospitals? What does it cover? Who does it cover (Tourists, illegal immigrants?) and what does it cover?

I have lived in both systems and have experienced pro and cons with both of theem.

tytytytytytytyt• 9 years ago

neoliberal corporate hegemony?

Crontab2• 9 years ago

Exactly why we need universal healthcare in the US

I agree but the political will to do it is just not there. Not yet, anyway.

leggomylibro• 9 years ago

We need more than universal healthcare; we need straight-up universal care. The idea should be that periods of unemployment or uncertainty are not terrifying gray areas for an average person. If people felt comfortable that they would have support for finding better pastures from a shitty job, they'd be more likely to seek them. If they felt more confident that they had prospects after a layoff, they'd be more likely to look for alternate employment instead of sitting around in an abandoned factory town as it rots to the ground around them.

I think it comes down to the fact that risk-taking cannot be a luxury, if we want the United States to remain a competitive and dynamic society. "Party of jobs?" How about a party for workers?

After all, as many conservatives will happily tell you, true value comes from the heads, the hearts, and the hands of individuals. Why are we giving so much free stuff to Big Jobernment?

woolvalley2• 9 years ago

Yes, because corporate & state hegemony is so much less in countries with universal healthcare /s

Universal healthcare is a good thing, but it won't really change things in that way.

JBlue422• 9 years ago

What's a worker to do? I live in a blue city in a blue state and vote for the blue people that say they're going to help out with this. They are not the majority and the other party are hell-bent on destroying what little advancements have been made.

Not to mention, it's pretty hard to reshape ideas that have been adopted or bred into the culture over the years. Health care should not be tied to employment but it's been that way for years with a lot of large incentives to keep it that way.

As an unemployed person, it sucks and you're looked down upon as it being your fault instead of a working for a poorly-run company or something else. You're not a victim, you're a perpetrator with a flaw. An undesirable.

That's the beauty of the 'real' Christian society of America - it's all black and white, good and evil. It's God's grace that they have their jobs and some flaw in your that you don't. It's not about luck, or business downturn, etc.

dragonwriter• 9 years ago

It would go a long way to breaking up the neoliberal corporate hegemony

No, it wouldn't. Neoliberal corporate hegemony rules all of the developed world, all of which, except the US, has universal healthcare.

goodoldboys• 9 years ago

Pretty much.

I fit into this category and my anecdotal experience tells me that hiring managers favor contractors for that reason as well as the fact that the money to pay them sometimes is listed as a different line-item on the budget. I think the combination of the two helps as well - when looking at a large contractor line-item, knowing that it can be scaled back with less headache than a Full Time Employee (FTE) makes it easier to stomach I think.

If you're comfortable with hustling for work when the time comes, then contracting can be a much better arrangement. I work from home, basically whenever I want, and I make more money than I would as a FTE (even when factoring in the outrageous cost of health insurance these days).

The biggest thing I think is the mental shift. As a FTE, there's a stronger sense of job security. But really, layoffs happen all the time and as a FTE I feel like I'd be less prepared to find another job, whereas being a contractor means I have to constantly be thinking about the future.

Pick your poison I guess.

walshemj5• 9 years ago

Its not well paid IT contractors its all the minimum wage disguised employment "gig" jobs that is where the growth is.

pcunite• 9 years ago

Your account was created 1111 days ago.

bryan11• 9 years ago

Has the increasing cost of health insurance motivated employers to start using more contract workers?

thaumaturgy• 9 years ago

Employers have been operating without any sense of social responsibility since long before health care became a part of the national conversation.

You could entirely remove any obligation of providing health insurance from all employers, and they'd still replace payrolled employees with contract workers if it saved them a buck.

lazerpants• 9 years ago

Probably. Do employers pay payroll tax on independent contractors? Those two items together make FTEs really expensive.

prklmn2• 9 years ago

Potentially. But now more than ever, companies with little to no revenue growth don't know how to boost earnings aside from cutting costs.

ThomPete3• 9 years ago

It has allowed them to avoid paying for that part to make business models like Ubers, TaskRabbits etc work.

csours3• 9 years ago

Yes, but they were doing this 10 years ago, so the recent increases in costs are probably only accelerating an existing trend.

ThomPete3• 9 years ago

Yup. I have been saying this for a couple of years now and which is why I am a firm believer that automation and digitalization are some of the biggest challenges for society although I am a proponent of both.

Crontab2• 9 years ago

That is why the US government itself likes contractors - it allows them to avoid dealing with the Civil Service.

jsloss2• 9 years ago

Published Dec 2016 ...

notfromhere2• 9 years ago

That's very recent for economic stats

jsloss2• 9 years ago

Ah, right. Good point.

frgtpsswrdlame2• 9 years ago

This is in large part because the sectors that saw the largest move towards alternative work arrangements—like education and medicine—have a high proportion of women.

Anyone know more about this? What jobs in those areas are becoming contract based?

ianai• 9 years ago

Lecturers and nurses, as a guess. I know a CEO of a nursing staffing agency. I imagine she contracts nurses out. In both cases contracts would let businesses treat shift hours as more isolated needs. That grants them lots of flexibility.

csours3• 9 years ago

My little sister is a physical therapist assistant (usually the person actually administering physical therapy), and a lot of her jobs have been contract based.

frgtpsswrdlame2• 9 years ago

Ah, I didn't realize those jobs were starting to turn!

InitialLastName2• 9 years ago

A female relative of mine is a occupational therapist (registered). Over the last 15 years, she's had a series of full time jobs in facilities (mostly retirement care) that each eventually converted into contract-based work, mostly as the facilities consolidated into umbrella companies. In each case, the working conditions have deteriorated to the point where she has been driven to find a new job, but the sense I get is that finding non-contractor work in that field at this point is getting asymptotically more difficult (at least in the mid-Atlantic US).

lkrubner• 9 years ago

Another powerful demographic force in the USA is the number of men who are ex-convicts:

""Few of us today are aware of the staggering size of this group. In a forthcoming study, Sarah Shannon, a sociologist at the University of Georgia, and five colleagues estimate that America’s criminal class (people with a felony conviction or prison time in their background) roughly quadrupled between 1980 and 2010 — from 5 million to nearly 20 million. Given the flow of sentencing since then, we might expect that population to have topped 23 million by now. And since roughly two and a half million people are behind bars today, this means that 20 million released felons and ex-prisoners are living outside institutions. This implies that at least one in eight adult men in the at-large population has been sentenced for a felony. And the ratio for prime-age men could be even higher, given the upsurge of sentencing in recent decades."

http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2017/10/after-incar...

jstanley2• 9 years ago

This implies that at least one in eight adult men in the at-large population has been sentenced for a felony.

That's an astounding statistic. I don't live in America, and I obviously don't run into a perfectly uniform sampling of society, but I'd guess way less than 1 in 8 people I meet have done something that deserves being thrown in prison.

gilrain• 9 years ago

Not that many people have done something that deserves being thrown in prison in the US, either. We're just far too happy to throw people in for things that don't deserve it, like non-violent drug offenses.

techiferous2• 9 years ago

population to have topped 23 million by now

Assuming an error rate of about 4%, this means that about 900,000 Americans have been wrongly convicted -- about the population of San Francisco.

brewdad• 9 years ago

Do you have a source for your 4% figure or is that just a gut feel estimate? I have no idea (as if anyone can definitively know) what the actual rate might be.

adventured• 9 years ago

In the time since the end of the article's data was sourced, until now, the U6 rate has fallen from 11% to 8.3% - which is back to where it was in the Summer of 1998. When it gets into the 7.x% levels, the employment market will be the second hottest in roughly 50 years next to the year 2000.

The time frame sourced, includes an U6 rate that reached nearly 18% and a U3 rate that hit 10%. It's not surprising that conventional full-time work numbers would be severely distorted both by the great recession and the recovery period.

The actual labor force reality is the US is facing a severe shortage of labor due to extremely slow population growth (and that assumes a big hit from inbound automation; if that's not as big as forecast, the shortage will be that much worse).

The US added $4.x trillion to its economy in the last ten years (despite the great recession), roughly the size of Germany's economy of 82 million people. It accomplished that while adding only 22 million people. Without a leap in automation, ie productivity gains, there's no way to keep matching that economic expansion in the next 10 and 20 years as population growth slows even further.

aantix• 9 years ago

I wonder if that added productivity comes from the rise of smart phones and being able to be connected all the time?

walshemj5• 9 years ago

depends how they fiddle th figure I though 3 or 4 % was the full employment rate

gwright• 9 years ago

I'm no expert but I think the 3/4% is relative to the U3 statistic and and not the U6 statistic mentioned above.

    http://portalseven.com/employment/unemployment_rate.jsp
    http://portalseven.com/employment/unemployment_rate_u6.jsp

s73ver_2• 9 years ago

Different stats depending on how you determine that someone is "unemployed". Some count anyone who doesn't have a job at all unemployed, while some will take that number, and remove people who wouldn't be part of the workforce anyway, like retired persons, stay at home parents, and students. And there's a few in between.

1_2__4• 9 years ago

If there is a labor shortage then why are the jobs being created of the kind that are less advantageous to workers? Isn’t the market supposed to “correct” in favor of labor in that scenario? Because it looks like the opposite has happened.

lotsofpulp2• 9 years ago

I think it depends on the flow of money. It doesn’t happen overnight, but if money is flowing unevenly and most of the population is not getting enough to maintain their consumption, then their consumption will fall reducing the need for employees. For now, many people are still reaching into the future and pulling money into the present by buying with home loans, student loans, and car loans.

But once that is unavailable, and demand starts dropping because they’re not seeing the money come back to them (since it’s easier and easier for it to get funneled to the top), then the market will adjust again. However, you never know when it can stop because governments tend to keep pulling money from the future to pay for things like healthcare and retirement welfare for people who didn't save enough.

scythe• 9 years ago

My understanding is that QE caused asset inflation which increased the price of land and therefore increased the price of housing. So wage gains have ended up in the hands of landlords.

eli_gottlieb2• 9 years ago

Isn’t the market supposed to “correct” in favor of labor in that scenario?

The purpose of neoliberalism is to ensure that no matter the actual ratio of supply to demand, the price of labor will never rise. Must never rise. The basis of this entire economy is low wages.

notfromhere2• 9 years ago

Hard to believe in a labor shortage when wages haven't gone up much

Mz• 9 years ago

I actually consider this to be good news overall. We do need to keep an eye on structuring things such that gig workers have the ability to grow real careers and have positive experiences (wrt adequate income and quality of life in terms of control over their time etc). We need to make sure these aren't structured in a fuck you way. But, I do gig work and it was a huge saving grace while extremely ill and homeless. It allowed me to develop an income and eventually get off the street.

dmix4• 9 years ago

Except that the go-to solution to every industry problems has been (and continues to be) to regulate it centrally with some agency or shut it down when that doesn't make sense, which in reality only works for a big-company full time salary job oriented economy. Instead of strengthening property laws and other personal liability protections, aka the type of recourses available to contractors, and/or simply offering traditional services and protections to everyone, not just full-time employee or those who meet a byzantine list of special conditions.

Instead of trying to fix these out-of-date legacy systems, a legal and regulatory system designed for a previous generation, everyone seems to want to attack the 'gig economy' and Silicon Valley as some purposefully exploitative entity, as if this is why Uber came into existence. Rather than a natural evolution of the workplace in a high-tech economy.

My favourite are those pushing the idea that unions are the missing piece of the puzzle in 2017.

alphonsegaston2• 9 years ago

Instead of understanding the history of labor force exploitation in the United States, everyone wants to pretend that a high-tech gloss over a return to Gilded Age-style Robber barons is a “natural evolution.” Tech workers survive in comfort within the last remaining vestiges of benefits that union members fought and died to obtain. The gig economy is just what they called “piecework” a century ago.

alkonaut2• 9 years ago

You'd think that where workers are easy to fire such as in the US, there would be less incentive to use contractors over employees, than in places with very rigid rules for firing.

munificent• 9 years ago

Full-time employees have to be provided healthcare and benefits. Contractors do not.

alkonaut2• 9 years ago

That sure weighs in the other direction. But presumably no contractor or other non-employee would (should) work for less cost to the employer since they still have to fund pensions, healthcare etc?

I'm guessing that the situation is that in some sectors there are people now working as "contractors" for the same type of money they would be making as employees - but without benefits.

So it's a good thing at least that all this translates to fantastic growth which ultimately trickles down... /s

williamscales• 9 years ago

Maybe there is less incentive to use contractors than in a country with really rigid laws, like France say. These data just show that there is still an incentive to use contractors over employees which is very interesting.

WalterBright5• 9 years ago

It's unsurprising considering the increasing costs and regulations imposed upon full time workers.

When you see figures on what workers are paid, the figure should be "total compensation", which includes things like benefits, FICA taxes paid on behalf of the employee, etc. These can easily add 50% to the compensation. Showing just the wage is disingenuous.

Aloha3• 9 years ago

Can you give some examples of what these costs are and how they've increased since 2005 (or 1995)?

woolvalley2• 9 years ago

Well everyone's health insurance premiums have gone up by quite a bit.

WalterBright5• 9 years ago

1. Employer's FICA contribution

2. Vacation paid time off

3. Sick leave paid time off

4. Maternity/Paternity paid time off

5. health care benefits

6. free/subsidized lunch

7. free bus passes

8. 401k employer matching contribution

9. employee stock purchase plans

10. stock options

11. bonuses

12. profit sharing / commissions

13. retirement plan

14. education tuition help

15. random other things like gym memberships, legal help, etc.

Here's some of Boeing's benefits:

http://www.boeing.com/careers/benefits/united-states-benefit...

Some statistics:

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/ecec.pdf

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ecec.nr0.htm

ryanmarsh• 9 years ago

This report from GAO[1] published in 2015, referenced in the report, referenced in TFA (whew), is very eye opening and worth a read.

It states very clearly how the economy is changing. Public policy will need to adapt to this new environment. Also, this is just the beginning of a massive shift in work that was predicted as far back as the Regan administration.

1: http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-15-168R

Most US jobs created since 2005 are not conventional full-time work

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