Justin Fox, Columnist

The Rise of the 1099 Economy

The shift in labor markets is real, if not yet transformative.

December 11, 2015 at 5:31 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

Signing up for a gig.
Photographer: Laura Buckman/Bloomberg

Provide news feedback or report an error

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

This article is for subscribers only.

There are a lot of names for it: the "sharing economy," the "gig economy" and the "on-demand economy" seem to be the three most popular. But the most precise description of the new labor relationships being enabled by digital technology may actually be, in the U.S. at least, the "1099 economy."

The 1099-MISC is the form that businesses, nonprofits and government agencies have to fill out when they pay someone $600 or more a year in nonemployee compensation. As the Internal Revenue Service instructs: