The Pew Research Center reports that 30% of US jobs are held by workers who are self-employed and the workers that they hire. The report states:
Self-employed Americans and the workers they hired accounted for 44 million jobs in 2014, or 30% of the national workforce, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of data the U.S. Census Bureau recently made publicly available for the first time. The self-employed, 14.6 million in all, represented 10% of the nation’s 146 million workers, and they in turn provided jobs for 29.4 million other workers.
Entrepreneurship and the role it plays in job creation is an issue of keen interest to policymakers. Self-employed workers, who work for profit or fees in their own business, encompass many of the nation’s entrepreneurs.1 Although much is known about how many and which workers are self-employed, far less is known about their job creation activities. This report attempts to fill this gap with estimates of the number of workers on the payrolls of the self-employed in 2014 and how job creation varies with these business owners’ demographic characteristics.2
Not all self-employed workers are job creators, however. Only about one-in-four of them (3.4 million) said they usually have at least one paid employee. Hiring is typically small-scale. Self-employed workers with employees had a median of three paid employees in 2014 and an average of 8.6 employees.3
Read the full story at Three-in-Ten U.S. Jobs Are Held by the Self-Employed and the Workers They Hire
