Measuring Alternative Work Arrangements for Research and Policy (2020) / Chapter Skim
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3 Role of the Contingent Worker Supplement in Fulfilling Measurement Needs Related to Alternative Work Arrangements
3 Role of the Contingent Worker Supplement in Fulfilling Measurement Needs Related to Alternative Work Arrangements
Pages 53-86
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From page 53... ...
As detailed in this chapter, the panel recommends broadening that scope to include other activities a person may have engaged in for pay. Whereas the current survey measures several different AWAs, the most important work-arrangement distinction to make is that between independent contractors and other self-employment arrangements, on the one hand, and traditional employee arrangements on the other.
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From page 54... ...
3.1. OVERVIEW OF THE CONTINGENT WORKER SUPPLEMENT This section briefly describes the purpose and current structure of the CWS.1 The CWS collects information from individuals identified as employed in the CPS concerning their main job and accepts both selfreports and proxy responses.
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From page 55... ...
: • Temporary help agency work • On-call work • Day laborer • Contract company work • Independent contractor In principle, independent contractors are by definition self-employed, but the survey's questions about independent contractor work are asked in the basic monthly CPS both of those who are coded as employees and those who are coded as self-employed (although the questions are worded somewhat differently)
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From page 56... ...
For the CPS, this is a practical necessity, because CPS responses must be obtained during the 10 days following the survey reference week, and it would be difficult if not impossible to interview all household members directly on that schedule. The BLS acknowledges this and notes that, ideally, all respondents would be self-reporters, but given the data collection environment and constraints, eliminating proxy responses simply is not feasible.
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From page 57... ...
the near-exclusive focus on respondents' main jobs; and (3) uncertainty over whether people can reliably answer some types of questions, such as about the nature of the employment arrangement (e.g., when the employment arrangement is mediated by another party as in the use of temporary help or contract com 6 The U.S.
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From page 58... ...
and work activities for which information is requested must be determined. The CWS measures work arrangements concerning the main job of each person who reports having worked during the survey reference period in the basic monthly CPS.
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From page 59... ...
, sponsored by the Federal Reserve Board, asks respondents about their primary work status during the prior month.8 All respondents, including those who report "not in the labor force" or "unemployed" as their primary status during the previous month, are asked whether they have worked in any of a variety of side jobs during that month. Estimates from the SHED suggest that holding such side jobs is very common among these two groups: in 2016 and 2017, 20 percent of those who were not in the labor force and 42 percent of those who were unemployed reported having at least some informal work activity or side job during the prior month (Abraham and Houseman, 2019)
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From page 60... ...
Similarly, results from two waves of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Survey of Informal Work Participation (SIWP) -- which replicates the basic CPS questions to determine whether a person is employed and also asks separately about participation in informal work activity -- show that accounting for informal work raised the employment rate estimated for those age 21 and older from 65.1 percent to 69.6 percent, a 4.5 percentage point increase (Bracha and Burke, 2018)
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From page 61... ...
In the existing CWS, however, if such work is not reported in response to the basic CPS employment question respondents are not asked about the arrangements under which it occurs. The CWS could address these issues -- a short reference period and potential underreporting of certain AWAs -- by asking CPS respondents who did not report any work in the main CPS a set of initial screener questions.
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From page 62... ...
Research based on other sources has generated additional evidence suggesting that secondary work activities are far more common than suggested by the CPS/CWS data and that much of this work takes the form of AWAs. Moreover, the same evidence suggests that income from these activities can be important to households experiencing a reduction in income from a main job, unusually high expenses, or some other type of financial distress.
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From page 63... ...
As was the case with the employment rate, the estimated rate of secondary job holding over the longer time horizon should be higher than the rate computed in the basic CPS, both because it captures work that is sporadic or interrupted and because the question wording will be designed to better capture work activity that is sometimes missed by standard household survey questions. A subset (at least)
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From page 64... ...
RECOMMENDATION 3.4: Implementation of the new questions pro posed for the CWS (in recommendations 3.1 through 3.3) will require extensive cognitive testing to determine the optimal reference period and wording to solicit responses about work that was not reported in the main CPS.
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From page 65... ...
uses the phrasing, "Thinking about your WORK SITUATION over the past seven days, have you been employed by an employer -- even minimally like for an hour or more -- from whom you receive money or goods? " The goal of providing examples is to better convey to respondents the kinds of income-generating work activities about which users of the data would like to know.
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From page 66... ...
There are ways to frame questions about additional work to capture activity that the basic monthly CPS might have missed while mitigating any impacts on subsequent responses to the standard CPS employment questions. For example, in the main CPS a question asked of people who are coded as unemployed or not in the labor force might note that sometimes people do some work on the side to supplement their income (or "while looking for work" if the person is unemployed)
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From page 67... ...
3.3. CATEGORIZING WORK AND WORKERS All six waves of the CWS measured the contingency of employment -- that is, whether a person's job is temporary in nature -- and selected types of AWAs, including independent contractors, temporary agency workers, on-call workers, day laborers, and contract company workers.
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From page 68... ...
It is important that a revised CWS continue to collect information on independent contractors, including platform workers, although the panel has some recommendations for modifying the questions that query respondents about these work arrangements. It is also important to collect information on temporary help workers and contract company workers, even though the value of surveying workers about such intermediated arrangements in the CWS is less clear.
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From page 69... ...
Idiosyncratic differences in the use and understanding of such terms may significantly affect how people respond to questions in household surveys about their independent contractor status.16 In the current CWS, respondents who identified both as self-employed and as employees in the main CPS are asked whether they are an "independent contractor, independent consultant, or freelance worker" on their main job. Those who identify as working for an organization in the main CPS (and hence are coded as employees)
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From page 70... ...
Many of those who are in informal work arrangements -- such as providing child care, elder care, cleaning, or maintenance services directly to households or providing services through online platforms or mobile apps -- also should be captured in the independent contractor category. Moreover, the definition of independent contractors given to those identified as wage and salary workers in the CWS -- "someone who obtains customers on their own to provide a product or service" -- may be misleading because this is not a defining characteristic of independent contractor work.
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From page 71... ...
The goal of the question asked of those identified as wage and salary workers in the main CPS is to distinguish between W-2 employees and nonemployees; the measure for independent contractor work should include the types of informal work activities captured in the SHED and other recent surveys in which the individual is not an employee. RECOMMENDATION 3.6: Cognitive testing should, among other things, determine how well respondents distinguish between employee and nonemployee concepts and explore ways to improve the accuracy of responses.
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From page 72... ...
At a minimum, payroll taxes should be withheld for everyone who is a wage and salary worker, but firms do not withhold taxes from payments to independent contractors. BLS could perform cognitive testing on the approach used by Abraham, Hershbein, and Houseman as one way of distinguishing between employee and nonemployee work.
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From page 73... ...
The survey could simply ask self-identified platform workers which company (or companies) they work with, and then allow the data to be sorted depending on the question at hand.
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From page 74... ...
RECOMMENDATION 3.9: BLS should consider dropping questions on temporary help agency employment and on contract company work from the CWS to make room for other, higher-priority questions. If the BLS opts to continue to ask about temporary help agency employment in a future CWS, it should consider revising the question wording to use terms like staffing agency in lieu of, or in addition to, temporary help
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From page 75... ...
The predictability of hours is an important dimension of a person's work activity that the CWS should ask about. As described in the next section, however, the panel recommends that this be done by asking directly about work scheduling and the predictability of hours, within the context of inquiring more generally about the characteristic of the person's job or jobs, as opposed to asking whether the person identifies as an on-call worker or day laborer.19 Depending on the arrangement, a day laborer also may be identified through questions pertaining to independent contractors or temporary help workers.
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From page 76... ...
While the alternative work arrangements described in the preceding section are mutually exclusive, job contingency and unpredictable schedules are characteristics of jobs that may be present in all or most work arrangements, including when workers are employees of the organization for which they perform work. Schedule Variability and Predictability As noted above, the CWS asks wage and salary workers whether they work on an on-call basis or whether they work as day laborers.
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From page 77... ...
Given the prevalence of erratic and unpredictable worker schedules, this aspect of employment and earnings instability should be measured with a much larger, nationally representative survey. 20 See, for example, Henley and Lambert (2014)
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From page 78... ...
For example, the 2017 American Time Use Survey Annual Leave Module asked respondents about the availability of a flexible work schedule, since sometimes an inconsistent -- though probably not unpredictable -- work schedule is what a worker 23 Ideally, in order to generate information on how schedule instability and unpredictability vary across today's employment arrangements, one would like to measure scheduling patterns of independent workers as well. Asking nonemployee workers about scheduling and hours, however, would require another battery of questions -- an expansion of the CWS that, while desirable, may not be feasible.
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From page 79... ...
, and about working from home. Cognitive testing revealed issues with respondents' answering that yielded changes in the question wording for the implemented module (Mockovak and Kaplan, 2015)
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From page 80... ...
3.5. OTHER INFORMATION NEEDED FOR UNDERSTANDING ALTERNATIVE WORK ARRANGEMENTS AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS FOR WORKERS Key goals of the CWS involve not only measuring the number of people in contingent and alternative work arrangements but also facilitating an understanding of the relationship between specific work arrangements, worker characteristics, and worker outcomes.
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From page 81... ...
The CWS collects information on earnings from those identified as being in a contingent or alternative work arrangement and selected other workers. These data may be supplemented with earnings data collected in the main CPS for those in the outgoing rotation groups (MIS4 and MIS8)
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From page 82... ...
Yet, these individuals may nonetheless prefer this arrangement if, for example, it pays a relatively high wage. Moreover, the wording of the preference questions varies across contingent and alternative work arrangements, and job preference questions are not asked of those in traditional wage and salary arrangements.
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From page 83... ...
Questions on job satisfaction and on the motivation of individuals to work a second job/work activity would be extremely useful for understanding people's work patterns.
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From page 84... ...
In addition, for those with a second job or work activity, BLS should ask about their motivations for holding multiple jobs. Job History and Work Transitions The CWS asks a series of questions about people's history in their main job.
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From page 85... ...
, on their transitions into their current employment arrange ments, and on whether they have looked for employment in another type of job. Researchers have effectively exploited the longitudinal structure of the CPS to study transitions into and out of the contingent and alternative work arrangements (Addison and Surfield, 2006, 2009; Farber, 1999; Houseman and Polivka, 2000; Katz and Krueger, 2017)
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From page 86... ...
Other surveys could be consulted to guide question wording. Questions about main and secondary reasons for having a job would be retained but revised as appropriate for the work characteristic.
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