There is one meaningful statistic missing from Justin Fox’s analysis at Bloomberg of the myths surrounding the “gig economy”:
The median number of years that wage and salary workers in the U.S. have been with their current employer was 4.2 when the Bureau of Labor Statistics last checked in January 2016. That’s higher than at any time in the 1980s or ’90s.
The percentage of Americans switching employers or shifting in and out of the workforce has been declining since the 1980s, economists at the Federal Reserve Board and University of Notre Dame documented last year.
Moves across state lines, which are often made by people searching for new job opportunities, have become much less common.Only 1.5 percent of Americans made such moves from early 2015 to early 2016, reports the U.S. Census Bureau, down from 3.6 percent from 1969 to 1970. Moves across county lines within the same state have also declined.
Self-employment has fallen slightly as a percentage of overall employment over the past decade, according to the BLS, and is far below the levels of the 1950s.
How can you reconcile the perception of a more mobile workforce with the reality of one that’s significantly less mobile? The answer is in the graph at the top of the page. Nearly a third of those who are unemployed have been unemployed for a very long time and people know that. People realize that a significant number of people who lose their jobs or leave them voluntarily never go back to work. That fear reduces mobility and keeps wages low.
I’m not sure how big an effect it has, but telework might be a small factor. I know a couple of people in 100% telework jobs and several others who telework part time.