How does the ‘gig economy’ look in Clark County?

The study tracks non-employer firms — businesses that earn $1,000 or more a year but have no employees — which usually encapsulates freelance workers and independent contractors.

Those firms are growing across the country. The study collected data from 50 metropolitan areas nationwide between 2012 and 2014 and found non-employer firms had grown markedly in the lodging and ground transportation industries. Non-employer firms in lodging grew 9.7 percent compared with a 3.6 percent growth in traditional, so-called “payroll” employers in the same industry. In ground transportation, non-employer firms grew 48 percent compared with 6.4 percent growth for payroll employers.

Similar trends exist here in the greater Portland metro area, the study shows. In the Hillsboro, Ore.-Portland-Vancouver area, non-employer firms outpaced payroll employers in transportation 22 percent versus 13 percent. For lodging, non-employer firms grew 41 percent compared with 5 percent of payroll employers.

According to the study, Portland trailed only Austin, Texas and San Francisco with the fastest growth rates of non-employer firms in the lodging industry.

“In short, a surge of non-employer firm activity — explosive in ground transportation and noticeable in accommodations — seems to directly coincide with large-scale expansion of the gig economy and uptake of online platform services,” according to the study.

The extra mile

The growth of ride-sharing apps, according to Lyft driver Jake Peebles, is right there on his iPhone screen.

“Just by looking at the app, you see more cars on the map constantly,” he said.

The 35-year-old works at a bank in downtown Vancouver. He and his wife recently had their second child, but he likes to log into Lyft just to see if there’s an extra buck or two between him and his home in Orchards. Sometimes there’s nothing, but sometimes there’s a little spending money to earn.

“I set (the money) aside,” he said. “It’s just beer money, coffee money — it’s just extra spending money so I don’t have to budget that into my main paycheck.”

Peebles said the only reason he got involved was because it’s so easy. It only takes signing up, owning a car and having a valid driver’s license. Peebles added that he could simply stop taking jobs with Lyft if he feels like his car is taking too much wear-and-tear from passengers.

The only obstacle left might be if new people made him uncomfortable, but that’s not the case.

“One day of your time and you’re signed up and ready to go, basically,” he said. “All you need is a car. They pay you weekly. You don’t even have to wait for money to come in, it just starts.”

Reservations

Lensing, the French teacher, wasn’t sure at first. Airbnb served her well on a trip with her father through Germany, but it was hard to be comfortable with strangers in her three-bedroom house in east Vancouver.

“Just for me, personally, as a young woman, if it’s a guy staying by himself I’ll say no or make sure Dane is home on the night they check-in,” she said. “Then, going from there, however they present themselves, or you can read reviews (of the person) and that says a lot about them.”

The market for moderately priced rooms near Portland is hot, though. The couple estimate they have earned $600 to $700 a month since July, though they took all of August off to travel to Scotland and Ireland. They have hosted 11 times, with one group as large as six people. One guest booked a room from late September to early November, which will net them about $800.

“I think our low rate attracts tourists from Portland,” Campbell said. “They’ll compromise a little distance from Portland for a lower (priced) accommodation.”

They aren’t clamoring to fill the rooms, though. They refuse to spend the extra income on bills, but instead put the money directly into their travel fund. And that’s exactly their choice.

“I think that’s part of the on-demand economy: you choose to work when you want,” Campbell said. “That means there’s a big variance in what you make. If I were an Uber driver, I could drive all week one week, then maybe make enough to take the next week off.”

Imperfect study

There are caveats to the data. Ian Hathaway and Mark Muro, the authors of the study, stress that using non-employer firms is not a perfect measurement of the power of ride- and room-sharing apps. For example, there were 15 million non-employer firms in 1997 compared with 24 million in 2014, suggesting that the apps are not the only cause of the growth.

The study also is from 2014, so it does not account for growth in the past year and a half.

And while growth rates seem to favor the upstart, non-employer firms, employment is mostly growing across the board. It would not be safe to assume that Uber or Airbnb are poised to put taxi companies and hotels out of business, but rather may be tapping into unmet demands.

“Whether platform-based gigging serves unmet consumer demand or cannibalizes it from payroll enterprises will be a critical question in the next few years,” the authors of the study wrote. “Likewise, additional work must tackle the size and growth of the gig economy in broader and harder-to-measure industries.”