While the new jobs report indicated confidence among American investors and employers, the statistics do not accurately reflect a rapidly evolving economy transformed by the tech industry.
The new jobs report release Friday show that new hiring beat expectations, with 255,000 new additions to American employment payrolls. MBO partners, a company that provides software to firms that employ independent workers, estimated that there are nearly 40 million independent workers over the age of 20 in the U.S. Many of these workers are left out of statistics when the Bureau of Labor Statistics is conducting its monthly survey of businesses for the jobs report.
Ian Siegel, the CEO of ZipRecruiter, an online job-listings service told Business Insider that, “Their [the Bureau of Labor and Statistics] methodology hasn’t caught up with the reality of the world.”
The reality of the world today is that millions of workers are independent and are not included in the monthly surveys nor do they have a specific classification under the BLS standards.
Under the government’s current standards, the difference between “independent contractor” and “employee” can be confusing and easily misconstrued. Companies and organizations that wrongly classify their work force can face serious penalties, which creates serious headaches for both employers and potential employees. Gene Zaino, CEO of MBO Partners, explains that part of the problem is that, “employment law is lagging behind the modern reality that many workers want to be independent.”
The BLS explained in a recent article that while there is no official definition for the “gig economy” or for “gig,” they are currently using the working definition that “gig employment” is a “single project or task for which a worker is hired, often through a digital marketplace, to work on demand.” They assert that many of these workers are counted among the part-time, self-employed, or those having multiple jobs.
The BLS began counting “gig workers” in 1995, using the term “contingent or alternative employment,” but because of funding cuts, the BLS hasn’t done a survey on them since 2005. If Congress approves the funding, it plans on doing a one-time count in May 2017, citing the development of applications and companies like ride-sharing (Uber and Lyft) as reasons that such a survey is critical to providing accurate employment numbers.
Send Tips to ted@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.