[dmix]

There was a study [1][2] which showed most of the job growth in recent years in the US has been via 'temporary' or part-time jobs. So the recovery that Obama took credit for using the blanket statistics such as 'unemployment rate' is heavily skewed towards people who compromised with jobs that were worse than the one they held before the crisis.

As the study mentions, this was heavily influenced by the effects of the 'gig economy' via tech companies which created a larger percentage of contractor jobs.

Instead of pretending the gig economy will go away because we don't like it, maybe we should strengthen the safety net to protect these types of contract workers. Such as expanding unemployment to contract workers who are employed for a certain timeframe. Which would also help provide protections to the large number of web developers, designers, and other tech jobs which are a growing in number in recent years who don't fit into the typical 9-to-5 framework.

[1] Source: https://www.investing.com/news/economy-news/nearly-95-of-all... (note: this trend started before Obama, within the last years of Bush's administration, but that would be less newsworthy headline)

[2] the actual study https://krueger.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/akrueger/f...