Economics
More Americans Are Self-Employed Than Any Time Since 2008 Crisis
A woman works at a desktop computer in a home office in Bern, Switzerland.
Photographer: Stefan Wermuth/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
The share of the US workforce that’s self-employed has climbed to the highest level since the Great Recession, as the pandemic jobs shake-up spurred many Americans to try working for themselves.
About 16.8 million people were classified as self-employed in June, according to Bloomberg calculations based on the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s an increase of 1.4 million workers over the past two years, representing more than one-third of the expansion in the labor force during that period.