The former president of a company in the specialty auto finance industry, Becky Catino now functions as the partner in charge of business development for 625 Investments, LLC, and is a cofounder of GigSmart. Through the latter, Becky Catino and her husband, Ted, have developed a mobile application to help businesses and nonprofits find interested workers and volunteers for short-term work.
In June, the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics gave its first official reading of how many citizens rely on freelancing, on-demand apps, and temporary work to earn an income or supplement income gained from full-time positions, and the number was staggering. More than 16.5 million Americans maintain alternative working situations, with 6 million holding contingent jobs as of May 2018 and another 10.6 million working as on-call workers, independent contractors, or temporary workers for contract firms. Main companies driving the gig economy in 2018 include Airbnb, Lyft, and Uber.
To put that figure in perspective, the steel and coal industries combined only employ roughly 230,000 Americans. In 2015, prominent economists Alan Krueger and Lawrence Katz figured the size of the gig economy workforce in the United States to be smaller than 0.5 percent of all employment, but Uber, among other drivers of the gig workforce, has expanded significantly since then. It’s hard to get a completely accurate figure, but more recent studies have concluded that the gig workers comprise 34 percent of the entire workforce in the United States.
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