Surveys of Nonstandard, Contingent, and Informal Employment: A Critical Review

Background:

There has been growing concern about the size of workforce in nonstandard, contingent and informal employment. As employment relations are the main means by which workers gain access to employees' rights and social security benefits, most workers in these nontraditional employment arrangements have limited access to earnings security and employees' rights and benefits (e.g., health insurance and pensions). The social and economic implications of these arrangements, therefore, are significant for individual workers and their families. Although identifying the prevalence and trends of these arrangements is the first step to examining their implications, lack of appropriate national data has made such an endeavor challenging for researchers. The purpose of this study is to identify nationally representative employment surveys from the literature and examine their usefulness in unveiling the prevalence of changing employment arrangements and related economic consequences for workers and their families.

Methods:

We reviewed peer-reviewed journal articles published between 1980 and March 2019 using library databases for social science, labor, policy, and economic literature. We used the following search keywords in the abstracts or titles of scholarly articles: nonstandard, alternative, contingent, or informal employment; independent contractor; temp worker; on-call worker; contract worker; self-employed; day laborer; gig or on-demand economy. We selected articles that provide clear definitions of various employment arrangements and present empirical analyses of nationally representative data either to measure the prevalence of those arrangements or to examine their effects on workers’ labor market outcomes.  We identified a total of 58 studies that met our selection criteria and the survey data that they used for our critical reviews. 

Findings:

Our reviews found that the studies used slightly different employment classifications and that they reported a diverging trend of the nonstandard, contingent, and informal employment. Seven nationally representative household or worker surveys and two establishment surveys were identified in these studies. After reviewing each of these employment surveys, we highlighted the following common limitations in the data – (1) most surveys have different reference periods and survey universes; (2) the number of a respondent’s jobs is limited to only two in most surveys; (3) most surveys clearly distinguish a main job from a secondary job and don’t assume that workers can work a couple of jobs of different classifications concurrently; (4) longitudinal surveys or employee data that link to employer characteristics are rare;  (5) a certain group of informal workers (e.g., domestic workers) are absent from most surveys; and (6) most surveys do not support a comprehensive examination of the effects of employment arrangements on job qualities and labor standards.

Implications:

We discussed how variations in the employment surveys were related to diverging findings on the national prevalence and trends of nonstandard, contingent, and informal employment. We recommended ways to strengthen national employment surveys so that the resulting data could generate a more accurate and comprehensive understanding of employment arrangements and labor standards. Such data should become the basis of appropriate policy responses for workers and employees affected by the labor market changes.