The numbers come first. Paul Osterman, professor emeritus at MIT Sloan School of Management, surveyed more than 6,000 U.S. adults aged 24 and up and conducted nearly 100 interviews with workers, employers, and staffing agencies for his new book, 'Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment.'
His conclusion: 35% of the American workforce, more than 55 million people, now falls into what he calls 'disposable' work — freelancers, contractors, gig workers, and a category he named 'marginal workers.'
Marginal workers, Osterman explains, are W-2 employees hired with the implicit understanding that they will not advance or stick around. 'They're not really attached to the organization,' he told Fortune. 'No one has job security anymore, but these folks are hired with that expectation and are not going to be around for long.'
That category spans adjunct faculty, staff attorneys hired case-by-case, high-turnover retail and service jobs, and contractors embedded for years inside major tech firms without a path to full-time status.
Gig platforms, often cited as the emblem of the modern labor market, are a rounding error by comparison. 'Gig jobs are not really the story,' Osterman said. 'They're about 2% of the workforce.'
Osterman specifically tested the claim that younger workers are voluntarily trading traditional careers for entrepreneurial risk-taking or gig flexibility. He found no such shift. 'The only shift in the attitudes of young people is towards work-family issues,' he said. 'But the desire to get a real job and have a career? That's stable.'
Daniel Zhao, chief economist at Glassdoor, told Fortune his own data backs Osterman's finding: 'We are still in a job market where hiring is very sluggish and workers feel stuck in their careers.' Zhao pointed to a 43% year-over-year jump in burnout mentions in Glassdoor reviews as of May, which he attributes to layoffs, leadership pressure, and AI-driven anxiety. He rejected any suggestion of diminished ambition: 'It's not because of a lack of ambition or laziness... they are just as committed to growing their career as their peers from previous generations were at the same age.'
Osterman traces the shift to the breakdown of the postwar labor 'accord' — a period marked by high unionization and employer caution about provoking organized labor.
The data cuts against a comfortable media narrative that treated Gen Z's career detachment as a lifestyle choice — 'financial nihilism,' career minimalism, the 'career lily pad.' Osterman's survey suggests the opposite: young workers want stability, and the market simply is not supplying it.
That is worth sitting with. A sluggish hiring climate, layoffs, and employers restructuring around contract and marginal status are not evidence of cultural decline among the young. They are evidence of an economy where capital has grown cautious about committing to permanent headcount, and where 55 million workers are absorbing that caution directly. Blaming a generation for choices it did not make is easier than fixing the hiring freeze itself. The market has already voted on who bears the risk — and for now, it is not the employer.
