EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The Independent Contractor Workforce: New Evidence on Its Size and Composition and Ways to Improve Its Measurement in Household Surveys

Katharine Abraham, Brad Hershbein, Susan N. Houseman and Beth C. Truesdale

ILR Review, 2024, vol. 77, issue 3, 336-365

Abstract: Good data on the size and composition of the independent contractor workforce are elusive. The authors carried out a series of focus groups to learn how independent contractors speak about their work. Based on those findings, they designed and fielded a telephone survey to elicit more accurate and complete information on independent contractors. Roughly 1 in 10 workers who initially reported working for an employer on one or more jobs (and thus were coded as employees) were independent contractors on at least one of those jobs. Incorporating these miscoded workers into estimates of main job work arrangements nearly doubles the share who are independent contractors to approximately 15% of all workers. Taking these workers into account substantively changes the demographic profile of the independent contractor workforce. Probing in household surveys to clarify a worker’s employment arrangement and identify all low-hours work is critical for accurately measuring independent contractor work.

Keywords: independent contractor; self-employment; work arrangements; survey design; miscoding; secondary work (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00197939241226945 (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Independent Contractor Workforce: New Evidence On Its Size and Composition and Ways to Improve Its Measurement in Household Surveys (2023) Downloads
Working Paper: The Independent Contractor Workforce: New Evidence on Its Size and Composition and Ways to Improve Its Measurement in Household Surveys (2023) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ilrrev:v:77:y:2024:i:3:p:336-365

DOI: 10.1177/00197939241226945

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in ILR Review from Cornell University, ILR School
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-31
Handle: RePEc:sae:ilrrev:v:77:y:2024:i:3:p:336-365