[LINK] "The Rise of the 1099 Economy"

[rfmcdonald]

Bloomberg View's Justin Fox writes about the complexities of--among others--the statistics of self-employment in the United States.

There are a lot of names for it: the "sharing economy," the "gig economy" and the "on-demand economy" seem to be the three most popular. But the most precise description of the new labor relationships being enabled by digital technology may actually be, in the U.S. at least, the "1099 economy."

The 1099-MISC is the form that businesses, nonprofits and government agencies have to fill out when they pay someone $600 or more a year in nonemployee compensation. As the Internal Revenue Service instructs:

Include fees, commissions, prizes and awards for services performed as a nonemployee, other forms of compensation for services performed for your trade or business by an individual who is not your employee, and fish purchases for cash.

There are actually two whole paragraphs about fish purchases in the 1099-MISC instructions.1 According to the IRS,

“Fish” means all fish and other forms of aquatic life. “Cash” means U.S. and foreign coin and currency and a cashier's check, bank draft, traveler's check, or money order.

But that's probably not what people are talking about when they talk about the 1099 economy. They mainly mean people who get app-development assignments via Upwork, dogsitting jobs via DogVacay, car passengers via Uber or consulting work via the Business Talent Group -- to name just a few of these new intermediaries. Although there is a company that wants to be the Uber of fishing guides ...

Signs of the purported explosion of such work have been hard to find in the standard employment data compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. According to BLS numbers, there has been no rise in self-employment or in the number of people working multiple jobs.