6. Reinvention can’t erase history
Photo illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios. Photo: Library of Congress
The gig economy isn’t new, but a well-timed rebrand after the Great Recession is responsible for people thinking it is. In fact, reliable economic data on what is broadly known as self-employment goes back about 80 years.
Why it matters: The rising popularity of the gig economy descriptor — as a catchall for any employees who are "not permanently attached" — is directly related to structural changes in the labor market creating a new way of working that wasn’t even possible before technological advances of the past decade.
The gig economy isn’t new, but a well-timed rebrand after the Great Recession is responsible for people thinking it is. In fact, reliable economic data on what is broadly known as self-employment goes back about 80 years.
Why it matters: The rising popularity of the gig economy descriptor — as a catchall for any employees who are "not permanently attached" — is directly related to structural changes in the labor market creating a new way of working that wasn’t even possible before technological advances of the past decade.
What they're saying: Martha Bird, a business anthropologist at the ADP Innovation Lab, tells Axios there is debate about when gig was first used in the context of work, but it is derived from gig carriages used by jazz musicians in New Orleans.
- Bird also traces the word back to the early English whirligig, a spinning children's toy, which is connected to something having a hub and then moving.
The big picture: A 2019 Moody’s report, citing data from the New York Federal Reserve Bank, noted that the self-employed segment of the workforce has been growing faster than total employment for the past decade. People started prioritizing independent work more over that time period and also using it for supplemental income even when they had full-time jobs.
The evolution of the gig economy has brought employment protection issues with it. The pandemic also shined a bright light on the government’s role in providing benefits to unemployed gig workers. Both developments correspond with an increase in the number of people trying to figure out what this segment of the economy really is.
- Looking at the past five years of Google Trends data, “gig economy” began to rise as a search term in 2018-2019, with a big spike beginning this March as pandemic-related jobless claims reached catastrophic levels.
- Still, searching for the term "freelance" is much more prevalent, as is the word part-time.
The bottom line: ADP's Bird warns against romanticizing the gig worker or viewing the subset as homogeneous.
- “There’s a lot of diversity of experiences that are nested in this term. I think we really need to be mindful in using these terms to characterize really what is essentially a diverse workforce.”