Author: Steven Pennington
The LEAD Feed has covered the increasing presence of nontraditional work arrangements in the labor market, including the upward trend in temporary and contract employment and the increased prevalence of nonstandard work schedules.
The federal government’s main instrument for tracking nontraditional work relationships (defined as temporary help agency workers, on-call workers, contract company workers, and independent contractors or freelancers) is called the Contingent Worker Supplement (CWS). However, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has not conducted the CWS since 2005, leaving a significant gap in our understanding of workers’ changing relationships with employers. In response, researchers from Harvard and Princeton conducted a version of the CWS in late 2015 and have recently published an initial analysis of the new data.
The researchers find “a substantial rise in the incidence of alternative work arrangements for U.S. workers from 2005 to 2015, with a particularly sharp increase in the share of workers being hired through contract firms.” The survey indicates that the percentage of workers engaged in nontraditional work arrangements increased from 10.1% in February 2005 to 15.8% in late 2015. The researchers note that the CWS showed little change in workers engaged in nontraditional work arrangements between 1995 and 2005.
This new data also provides some perspective for the online “gig economy” - short-hand for an increasing number of tech-centric firms offering contract jobs to workers through smartphone apps. The most prominent employer in the gig economy is Uber.
For a variety of reasons, growth in this segment of the economy has raised concerns among some about the changing nature of worker-employer relations in the United States. However, this new data shows that only about 0.5% of workers are working through an online intermediary (and most of these appear to have been Uber drivers). In the writers’ words, “the online gig workforce is relatively small compared to other forms of alternative work arrangements, although it is growing very rapidly.”