The reasons people give for working multiple jobs are strongly related to how they evaluate their employment situation. Those who say they work multiple jobs for some positive reason — they want to earn extra money; they enjoy, love or are interested in what they do; or they see it as a hobby — are generally upbeat about their work. Sixty-four percent rate their job situation a 7 or above, whereas those who work multiple jobs out of necessity view their work less favorably (41 percent rate their job a 7 or above).

Over all, very few — just 2 percent — say they work multiple jobs because they can’t find a full-time job.

These answers shed light on why people work multiple jobs, but it remains unclear why self-employment relationships have expanded over the last four decades. Especially in recent years, technology has played a role, greatly helping customers match up with contractors and making it easier to find an interesting job that leads to extra income.

Yet those technologies are available in other countries, which have not experienced the same trend. In France and Canada, the proportion of people filing government pension taxes indicating that they receive self-employment income is less than half that of the United States — around 6 percent. In Canada, the rate has not meaningfully increased since 2009. In France, the share of people filing self-employment taxes did not change from 1994 to 2009 and seems to have gone up slightly since then (to 6 percent from 5 percent) in response to changes made by the French government to streamline tax filing for the self-employed.

Another possibility is that U.S. workers are finding it harder to make ends meet in the face of growing income inequality and rising costs for health care, education and housing. In Canada and France, health care and postsecondary education are both more affordable and financed by the public sector.

Whatever the reasons for the increase, workers rather than employers seem to be driving the trend in self-employment, since the increase comes from people combining self-employment with traditional employee relationships. Some politicians and places, like California, have sought to curb self-employment, on the theory that employers have created the gig economy in an effort to evade their tax and regulatory obligations. The reality is more complicated.

Jonathan Rothwell is the author of “A Republic of Equals: A Manifesto for a Just Society,” recently published by Princeton University Press. He is the Principal Economist at Gallup, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a visiting scholar at the George Washington University Institute of Public Policy. You can follow him on Twitter at @jtrothwell, and listen to his podcast, “Out of the Echo Chamber.”

The 2019 Gallup Great Jobs Survey was funded by The Lumina Foundation, the Gates Foundation and Omidyar Network. Data are available on the Gallup website. Results are based on mail surveys conducted Feb. 8 to April 1, 2019, with a random sample of 9,671 adults 18 and older in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.