“Moving is the worst. Yard work is the worst. Building IKEA furniture is the worst.” So began a 2015 report on TaskRabbit, a company founded in 2008 (under the name RunMyErrand), that helps people hire others to do their chores. As of 2019 there were about 140,000 of these freelancers, whom the company calls Taskers, and TaskRabbit operated in 53 U.S.

cities, Great Britain, and Canada.

Why would becoming a Tasker seem appealing to some workers? The great majority of Taskers are part-time workers, who want flexibility in their employment; the company’s pitch to potential Taskers contains the slogan “Start Tasking. Earn money your way.” and features testimonials from workers who combined employment with parenting, careers in the arts, and so on.

Working part-time for a variety of clients isn’t a new phenomenon. On urban street corners across America, workers still line up early each morning in the hope of getting day jobs in industries like construction, where the need for workers fluctuates, sometimes unpredictably. For more skilled workers, there are numerous online resources, as well as temporary staffing agencies like Allegis Group, that provide workers on a subcontracting basis, from a few days to months at a time. And some people still find temporary jobs by calling numbers listed in classified ads, or even going door to door.

But TaskRabbit—founded the year after Apple introduced its first iPhone—tries to use the ubiquity of smartphones to simplify the process. Originally it was set up as a kind of auction market, in which potential employers and workers placed bids, but since 2014 it has relied on a streamlined system that is very similar to the way car services like Uber or Lyft match riders with willing drivers. TaskRabbit’s app let those seeking help make their needs known simply by tapping on one of a few common chores; potential workers can then offer to do jobs that match the locations and skills they have put in their profiles, again simply by tapping on jobs that appear on their smartphones. (They have already specified their hourly rate.) The process takes a lot less time and effort than standing on street corners, pounding the pavement, performing online job searches, or even calling the numbers from old-style classified ads.

How big a deal are enterprises like TaskRabbit? Some observers suggest that we’re seeing the rise of a gig economy, in which large numbers of people freelance, moving from job to job rather than being formal employees of a large firm. There’s probably some hype in these pronouncements, but real change does seem to be happening. In fact, one recent study concludes that the number of people with alternative work arrangements such as freelancing grew 50% from 2005 to 2015, accounting for all net U.S. job growth over that period. It’s hard to estimate the number of workers in the gig economy. As of 2018, varying surveys find the share of independent workers in the U.S. economy to be between 10% and 36% of the workforce.

Questions:-

1. How is the matching of job-seekers and employers through services like TaskRabbit likely to affect frictional unemployment?
2. What is the likely effect of such services on the number of people considered to be in the labor force?
3. Some analysts suggest that most freelancers have other jobs, and only do gig economy work on the side. How does that statement help explain the lack of clear evidence for a growing gig economy?