Most strikingly, between 2005 and 2015, the US labour market added 9.1 million jobs – including 9.4 million alternative arrangement jobs. This means that the net increase in US jobs since 2005 has been solely from these sorts of (often precarious) positions. Similar trends can be seen in self-employment. While the number of people who identify as self-employed has decreased, the number of people who filed the 1099 tax form for self-employment in the United States has increased. What we see here is effectively an acceleration of the long-term tendency towards more precarious employment, particularly after 2008. The same trends are observable in the United Kingdom, where self-employment has created 66.5 per cent of net employment after 2008 and is the only thing that has staved off much higher levels of unemployment.

Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, loc. 70