On June 7, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released its long-awaited contingent worker survey (CWS) of precarious or irregular employment. This is the first such survey of “contingent and alternative employment arrangements,” as the BLS calls the various forms of irregular work, since 2005.

Despite many impressionistic claims about the growth of precarious work, a comparison between the 2005 and 2018 BLS results shows a slight decline in the proportion of these forms of irregular employment from 10.7% of the workforce to 10.1% in 2017. The total number of such jobs in the BLS survey grew from 14,826,000 in 2005 to 15,482,000 in 2017. That’s a relatively small gain of 656,000 jobs or by 4.6% over twelve years. The total number of employed workers, however, grew faster by 14,379,000 or by 10.4%.

The New York Times reported these results under the headline, “How the Gig Economy Is Reshaping Work: Not So Much.” Doug Henwood similarly headlined his analysis “No, It’s Not a Gig Economy.” An Economic Policy Institute comment on the new BLS report agrees that “we are not becoming a nation of freelancers.”