Gig Economy: A Rise in Part-Time Employment

For ages, employment was virtually unchanged: if you needed a man or woman to do a specific job, you hired one.

But “specific” is not the best term here – you didn’t hire someone to only do your quarterly financial reports or to create you one batch of your product – you hired someone to do the tasks above and any other similar task that comes later on.

In short, you had an employee on a permanent contract. But times change, and the forms of employment are changing with them.

Today, many companies find it easier not to hire an employee but to let a subcontractor do a specific task with a contract valid for that task alone. It is called “gig economy”, and it is getting bigger.

What is gig economy

Think of it like this: a hired motorcycle courier will only effectively work when needed, and fill the rest of his time at work with whatever else he can, from mobile casino play to reading the news on his smartphone. But you’ll still have to pay him a full salary. If you hire a motorcycle courier subcontractor, though, you only pay for each individual delivery – a “gig”, if you like. The courier in question is not tied to your business – it can service several others on the same day even. What concerns you is that he does his job for you, and you only pay him for the work actually done.

One of the best examples of this new way of working is Uber, a company with no employees but a vast personnel of drivers who only work when they have the time – and they are only paid for the work they actually do. And it is growing – a report issued by staffing company Randstad Canada states that around 20 to 30 percent of all Canadian workers are “non-traditional” already, and their numbers are expected to rise in the coming years.

The benefits

For companies, switching to a gig economy is clearly the more efficient path. Instead of hiring an employee on a long-term contract, companies can now call in anyone they want for as many hours as they need. Sometimes, this form of working is referred to as the “Hollywood model”, when a cast and crew is assembled to do a specific task (a movie in this case), then they move on to another project altogether.

And it is the preferred choice for many workers, too. Being self-employed seems like a great idea especially for workers coming of age who want to ease their way out of the workforce market, but many of the younger generations – millennials, for example – expect to become self-employed over the coming years. While this does hurt their job security, it provides them with the flexibility they need in their lives.

Now it is up to the regulators to accept this new reality and work on a brand new social insurance system. And this will be a task harder than you think.