A favorite parlour game among the D.C. media is to ponder why Americans seem so angry this election season. Reporters drop themselves into primary states like Marlin Perkins in a Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom episode, trying to decipher these strange creatures who are so frustrated with the U.S. economy that they’d vote for a faux-populist billionaire or an avowed socialist. Why isn’t everybody satisfied with a status quo of slow-yet-steady economic recovery and a record number of consecutive months of private sector job growth?

But The New York Times’s Neil Irwin might have found an answer last week, when he pointed to eye-opening new research from Princeton’s Alan Krueger and Harvard’s Lawrence Katz on Americans in alternative work arrangements, which they defined as “temporary help agency workers, on-call workers, contract workers, and independent contractors or freelancers.” This cohort of the workforce grew from 10.1 percent in 2005 to 15.8 percent at the end of 2015, representing an increase of 9.4 million workers. That’s all of the growth in the labor market over the past decade.

This does not reflect the “Uber revolution”—Krueger and Katz find that only a small sliver of contract and temp workers got their employment through an online app. What the data show is that companies have succeeded in reducing staff and filling labor needs with temp workers, freelancers, perma-lancers, and the like. This unburdens them from having to supply workers with health and retirement benefits, overtime pay, holidays, sick days, disability, workers compensation—any social insurance, basically. And it puts tremendous stress upon individual workers to finance their safety net themselves.

I should know. I’ve been working in this capacity since about 2002.

Before journalism, I was a gig-to-gig freelancer in television post-production, right up until last year in fact. Staff editing jobs are rare; usually you’re hired to work on a show, and when it ends its run, you’re done. Most of the time employers would withhold taxes and pay into Social Security. The nicer ones even paid overtime. More often they would build overtime into your regular work schedule, a form of wage theft. Several years ago, I started a job, and on the first day, the supervisor asked me to immediately fill out time sheets for the entire twelve-week run, stating eleven-hour days. This meant I could never accrue overtime even if I worked 55 hours a week, though the production company could claim to be nominally complying with overtime laws. And 55 hours a week can be a slow one in post-production. The resultant loss of wages probably came to thousands of dollars.