Banananomics: Revealing Now Why One Job Is Not Enough

In the U.S., full-time work fell by 6,000 jobs, while part-time work increased by 691,000.

Inputs that matter: Employment is shifting globally, favoring self-employed gig workers.

• Due to living cost increases, the gig economy contributed heavily to the 5.2% increase in the number of multiple job holders.

• With over 30% of U.S. workers now freelancers, the gig economy is on track to encompass more than half of the workforce by 2027.

The opportunity: Nearly 75,000 tech workers have lost their jobs at 257 companies, including Tesla, Microsoft, Google, Dell, Cisco, and SAP, year to date.

• IBM is planning to replace more than 8,000 jobs with AI.

• Tesla's Giga Shanghai plant operates with 95% automation, which allows the plant to complete a vehicle in just 39.62 seconds with very little need for human labor.

Zoom in: Meanwhile, employees at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, voted to join the United Auto Workers (UAW) in a historic win for organized labor.

• The German automaker's Chattanooga plant was the only VW factory in the world not to be represented by a union.

• UAW had been trying to unionize the plant since 2008.

Between the lines: Hourly wages rose 0.6% in January from the previous month and are up 4.5% from a year earlier, outpacing inflation.

• Some of this growth results from new minimum wage laws where 28 states and D.C. have increased minimum wage since January 2014.

• "Wages still have some catching up to do," says Julia Pollak, Chief Economist for ZipRecruiter.

• Most banks and economists forecasted the economy would grow 2.5% in the first quarter. Instead, it grew just 1.6%.

• "We're moving in the wrong direction, again, on the inflation story," Ben Ayers, Nationwide's senior economist, told CNN in an interview.

Follow the money: M2 is the U.S. Federal Reserve's estimate of the total money supply based on short-term savings, checking, and cash, a critical factor in forecasting inflation.

• The Motley Fool warns that we are facing the most significant drop in M2 since the Great Depression.

• CNBC states, "The personal saving rate fell to 3.2%, down 0.4 percentage points from February and two full percentage points from a year ago."

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