The Atlantic

The Truth About the Gig Economy

Uber and similar companies aren’t driving huge changes in the way that Americans make a living.
Source: Simon Dawson / Reuters

The workforce is getting Uberized. The gig economy is taking over the world. Independent-contractor jobs are the new normal. In the postrecession years, this became conventional wisdom, as more and more Americans took jobs—well, “jobs”—with companies such as Postmates, Fiverr, TaskRabbit, and Lyft. But the gig economy was then and is now a more marginal phenomenon than it might have seemed.

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