More jobs may be beyond "growth", and instead be more people working 2 jobs

I dug a little more into the disappointing US jobs report for May, and one statistic jumped out at me.

If you look at this chart, you can see that the number of Americans that have multiple jobs keeps increasing. 7.86 million had more than 1 job in May 2019, and that's nearly 800,000 more than we had 4 years ago.

This may help explain why we're seeing job growth outpace the number of people "employed" in the last couple of years, and labor force growth is even lower. This makes the unemployment rate a cosmetically low 3.6%.

May 2017-May 2019, US
Job growth +4.79 million
People "employed" +3.83 million
Labor Force +2.73 million

My other point here is this. If our economy is allegedly so strong, why do so many more people feel a need to take on multiple jobs? If you go back further in this statistic, this trend has slightly increased over time and especially goes up over the course of expansions while declining in recessions. But it's really picked up over the last 5, and May's total was the highest for that month in the last 20 years, and makes me wonder if it's reflection of more jobs being part of the "gig economy."

Former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich recently talked about these kind of jobs, and how they often hold workers in a situation where it undercuts working situations for most employees, gig or otherwise.

Gig work is making capitalism harsher. Unless government defines legitimate gig work more narrowly and provides stronger safety nets for gig workers, gig capitalism cannot endure. https://t.co/bz4C1zhrkD

— Robert Reich (@RBReich) June 2, 2019

At the rate gig work is growing, future generations won’t have a minimum wage, unemployment insurance, worker’s compensation for injuries, employer-provided social security, overtime, family and medical leave, disability insurance, or the right to form unions and collectively bargain.

Why is this happening? Because it’s so profitable for corporations to use gig workers instead of full-time employees.

Gig workers are about 30% cheaper because companies pay them only when they need them, and don’t have to spend on the above-mentioned labor protections.

Increasingly, businesses need only a small pool of “talent” anchored in the enterprise – innovators and strategists responsible for the firm’s competitive strength.

Other workers are becoming fungible, sought only for reliability and low cost. So, in effect, economic risks are shifting to them.

Which means it becomes very likely that as the economy slows and falls into the recession we are overdue to have, a lot of these gigs go by the wayside as people don't need to be called in to do the extra work.

Either that, or people will have to rely on their gig job as the more permanent job goes away, which will greatly increase the insecurity a lot of people would face. And people know how close to the edge they can be, which is yet another reason why this "booming economy" likely doesn't feel so hot to a lot of everyday Americans.