The 'Gig Economy' Takes Hold in America

Over at The Daily Beast, editor Tina Brown spots an ominous employment trend: Careers are becoming a thing of the past. In their place, the workforce is being forced to stitch together a combination of short-term, part-time gigs in order to make ends meet:

My own anecdotal evidence among friends is now borne out by an exclusive poll conducted last week by The Daily Beast and Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates. Five hundred employed U.S. citizens aged 18 and over were interviewed via the Internet on January 8 and 9.

A full one-third of our respondents are now working either freelance or in two jobs. And nearly one in two of them report taking on additional positions during the last six months.

Just as startling, these new alternative workers are not overwhelmingly low-income. They're college-educated Americans who earn more than $75,000 a year.

Welcome to the age of Gigonomics.

Last week, the unemployment rate rose to 7.2%. According to the Department of Labor, our current recession has cost the country 2.59 million jobs. Neither piece of news will do anything but exacerbate the pain of "Gigonomics," as The New York Times reports:

Nearly as troubling, hundreds of thousands more people sought full-time work in December but could not get more than part-time jobs.

If those workers are included, the so-called total unemployment rate swelled to 13.5 percernt, from 12.6 percent in November and just 8.7 percent at the start of the recession. Total unemployment includes the officially unemployed, the part-timers who seek more hours and the nearly 300,000 who would like a job but tell pollsters from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that they are too discouraged to look.

While many of our employment woes are directly attributable to the economic meltdown, the question is whether the part-time workforce model will become the new paradigm for business in America. And if healthcare benefits remain tied to full time employment status, what will the legion of every-wandering multi-taskers do to get coverage?