One of the important trends we track is the growth of the contingent workforce. A recent Aberdeen study finds that:
" ... the modern contingent labor umbrella encompasses over 22% of the average organization’s total workforce ..."
They also found that most organizations plan to increase their use of contingent workers in the future.
Aberdeen defines contingent workers as including classic temporary labor (sourced through staffing suppliers), independent consultants and statement of work-based projects and services (SOW).
Extrapolating this data to all U.S. private,employee businesses would mean more than 20 million Americans are contingent workers. While this is a very rough estimate (the Aberdeen data was not meant to extrapolated this way), even if it's off by a lot it's clear that many millions of Americans work on a contingent basis.
So what does this have to do with coworking? Many in this very large group of people don't work in traditional offices, making them part of the broader addressable market for coworking facilities.
When you add in corporate distributed workers, the self-employed and small businesses looking for inexpensive, flexible space the potential addressable market gets very, very large - easily 30-40 million Americans or more.
This is one of the reason we are so optimistic about the growth of coworking.
