In Picking Up Work Here and There, Many Miss Out on Unemployment Check

She and her fiancé had been putting away money for their wedding, so they have a cushion. “But I do wonder what happens to people in my position who don’t have the money we saved for our wedding,” she said.

Just how many people juggle two or more part-time jobs or pick up a side gig like driving for Lyft in addition to a full-time job is fuzzy. Official figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that are based on surveys show that a tiny slice of workers — about 5 percent — fall into this group, but several economists say the measurement suffers from an outdated definition of what constitutes paid work and misleading assumptions about work schedules.

The bureau asks about work only in a specific reference week, for instance, which may not capture contract workers and freelancers with shifting schedules. Nor does it count self-employed individuals who do more than one job.

“What we have been discovering is that the B.L.S. numbers are just not telling the full story,” said Hye Jin Rho, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a left-leaning research group in Washington, who recently completed a study of multiple job holders. The researchers found that as much as 16 percent of the American work force — more than 26 million people — depends on multiple jobs for income.

Adam Ozimek, chief economist at Upwork, an online platform for hiring freelancers, who also studies people with multiple jobs, argues that the total is even higher — that 35 percent of workers do some sort of freelancing over the course of a year. “Self-employment has always been a feature of the modern American economy,” he said, it just hasn’t been recognized by official measures or policies.