Statistics on the dissolution of corporate labor, the US
KIM Seok-hyeon.
first upoaded: 2020-12-31.
last updated: 2020-12-31.
The author has addressed on the dissolution of corporate labor in the authors' previous article [1] as such: “The dissolution of corporate labor takes a variety of ways or forms such as: wage restraints, shortened work hours, part time, outsourced and contracted labor, reduction of corporate funding on pensions, increased mobility between jobs and occupations.” The author now attempts to test such a perception to available statistics of the US in this article and will do so as for South Korea in the following article. The US is a huge economy (its portion of world GDP was half in the 50's and has been declining but still is a quarter), most watched because of its influence on other countries and its role as a trend setter, and so is frequently used as a benchmark case. And since the US has a long timer series of economic statistics including employment statistics, it is very good to observe trends in the long term. For example, the Bureau of labor statistics (shortly BLS) in charge of official employment statistics provides employment statistics dating back to 1948 from its website.[2] In addition to that, other official agents such the US Census Bureau and the IRS (Internal Revenue Service) and many research institutions and researchers provide a lot of statistics on the US economy. So the US is a very good case in examining long term trends in the economy in general and of course in employment in specific. This article will draw on the BLS statistics mostly because it is most authoritative and comprehensive sources on employment trend but also on other sources because there is divergence between the BLS statistics and other sources of statistics on the issue of dissolution of corporate labor that is the concern of this article.
Sources: The BLS website (bls.gov/data); data retrieved by the author.
Note: In the year 1994, the CPS, which is the source of the BLS statistics, was redesigned and so there is a discrepancy of the time series between since 1994 and before 1994. The refinement of part-time work in terms of reasons of voluntary and involuntary choice reveals further the nature of part time work. The BLS also provides part-time work due to two reasons: voluntary (or non-economic reason) and involuntary (or economic reason) at its website.[7] From this data we can see that the proportion of the voluntary part time workers among the employed is much larger than that of involuntary part-time workers and shows rather a steady increasing trend (Fig 2). The proportion of the voluntary part-time workers to employment was about 9.5 percent in 1956 and rose to about 14 percent in 2018. On the other hand, the proportion of the involuntary part-time employment to the total employment does not show an one-sided trend but only fluctuates. And the fact that in the US the proportion of the voluntary part time workers is much larger than that of the involuntary suggests that part time work serves well the need of short work time and has been established as a type of work. As of 2016, the part-time workers have the following characteristics. Women have a higher rate of voluntary part-time work than men; teenagers and old people have lager rates than the age group of 25 to 54; the reason of voluntary part time work is first mostly schooling and second mostly family and personal obligations.[8] Figure 2. Part-time workers: voluntary (noneconomic reason) vs. involuntary (economic reason)
Sources: The BLS website (bls.gov/data); data retrieved by the author.
Note: In the year 1994, the CPS, which is the source of the BLS statistics, was redesigned and so there is a discrepancy of the time series between since 1994 and before 1994. The BLS distinguishes the self-employed from other classes of worker: wage and salary employees and unpaid family workers. The self-employed are further refined into unincorporated and incorporated. An unincorporated self-employed person files tax forms as an individual and the incorporated self-employed person file tax forms as an salaried employee working for his or her incorporation. The BLS website provides the time series of the unincorporated self-employed statistics from 1948 and the one of the incorporated self-employed from 2000. As for the chart for the self-employed statistics (Figure 3), the statistics for the unincorporated self-employed is based on the BLS website but the time series of 1994-1999 for the incorporated self-employed draws on a BLS article which has the time span from 1994-2016 and is consistent with the data from the BLS website for 2000-2016.[9] Overall, the proportion of the unincorporated self-employed to that of the total employed declined from about 18 percent in 1948 to about 6 percent in 2018. This decline will be elucidated by decomposing the employment by agriculture and non-agriculture in the next paragraph. On the other hand, the proportion of the incorporated self-employed to the total employment shows a tendency to increase slightly from under four percent in 1994 to slightly over four percent in 2018. As of 2015, the self-employed have the following characteristics. Self-employment rates (the proportion of the self-employed to the total employment) are higher for older workers than for younger workers; higher for men than for women; higher for veterans than for non-veterans.[10] Figure 3. Self-employed: incorporated vs. corporated
Sources: The BLS website (bls.gov/data); data retrieved by the author.
Note: In the year 1994, the CPS, which is the source of the BLS statistics, was redesigned and so there is a discrepancy of the time series between since 1994 and before 1994. As mentioned, Figure 4 shows the decomposition of the employment by sector: agricultural and non-agricultural. The self-employed in the agricultural sector, having occupied almost a half of the total employment in 1948, have tended to decrease to almost a tiny level. This is due to the reduction of the number of small farms accompanied by the increase of the number of large farms.[11] The self-employed in the non-agricultural sector had decreased till the 1970s, had increased in the next decade, and have been decreasing since the 1990s. The proportion of the self-employed to the total employment, a little lower than six percent recently, has decreased a little bit from a little over six percent in 1970 around. So the self-employed in the non-agricultural sector has not declined overall but has done so only recently. Figure 4. Self-employed by sector: agricultural and non-agricultural

Sources: The BLS website (bls.gov/data); data retrieved by the author.
Note: In the year 1994, the CPS, which is the source of the BLS statistics, was redesigned and so there is a discrepancy of the time series between since 1994 and before 1994.
Sources: The tables provided by the relevant BLS articles. The list of official news releases of contingent workers are in text note [13].
Alternative employment arrangements cover four types of workers: in decreasing order of size, independent contract workers (6 percent level of the employed), on-call workers (1 percent level), temporary help agency workers (almost below 1 percent), and workers provided contract firms (around 0.5 percent) (Figure 6).[15] The proportions of the workers with alternative employment arrangements to the total employment do not show any one-sided trend. In contrast with traditional employment arrangements, independent workers are more likely to be old in age, to be in occupations of management, business, and financial operations, and to be in industries of construction and in professional and business services.[16] Independent workers prefer their status quo overwhelmingly and they are mostly noncontingent workers, which implies this type of workers has formed a voluntary and very successful group outside the stereotyped corporate labor. On the other hand, on-call workers and temporary help agency workers show roughly a half and half mix in their preference of their current job status over traditional employment arrangements.[17]
Figure 6. Workers with alternative employment arrangements by type of arrangement
Sources: The tables provided by the relevant BLS articles. The list of official news releases of contingent workers are in text note [13].

Sources: The counting of freelancers is provided by the the 2018 survey report of the Edelman Intelligence commissioned by the FU and Upwork whose web address is introduced above in text note [19] and the proportion of freelancers to the employment is calculated by the author based on the employment statistics of the BLS.
The MGI (McKinsey Global institute) defines an 'independent worker' as a worker some portion of whose income of the past 12 months comes from independent activities whether providing labor, selling goods, or leasing assets. Independent activity requires such conditions as: a high degree of autonomy in work; the worker is paid by the task, assignment, or sales; and the relationship between the worker and the customer or client is short-term. The MGI's definition of independent activities include selling goods and leasing assets is broader than the CPS's definition of employment clearly[21] and that of FU and Upwork implicitly, which may bring about a large size of estimation; in fact, it does so. The counting of independent workers of the US in 2015 is about 68 millions, which is larger than that of freelancers provided by FU and Upwork.[22] By defining the primary independent worker as the independent worker more than a half of whose income comes from independent work, the number of primary independent workers is 31 million and the rest, names as supplementary independent workers is 36 million (the report provides the statistics for several other European countries too).
Another source of the statistics for non-traditional workers is the tax file information of sole proprietors. The IRS (Internal Revenue Service) provides the statistics of the self-proprietors or unincorporated self-employed who file tax returns with schedule C along with the form 1044.[23] And the US Census Bureau provides the statistics of the non-employing sole proprietors processed from the same sources of the IRS for self-proprietors.[24] The statistics both for the sole proprietors and for the non-employing sold proprietors are presented in Figure 8. From 1998 to 2017, the proportion of the sole proprietors to the employed increased from 13 percent to a little higher than 16 percent. The nonemploying sole proprietors show as a similar trend as that of the sole proprietors, though about 2 percentage points lower than that of the sole proprietors. And these rates are also higher than those for the self-employed of the BLS (nowadays about 6 percent) and for the workers with alternative employment arrangements (about 10 percent in sum). The advantage of the nonemployer statistics is that sectoral decomposition of the nonemploying sole proprietors is also possible. A Brookings report addresses the sectoral trend of nonemployer statistics and presents a recent rise of nonemployers in the transportation and travel sector which coincides with the emergence of the gig works on the platform such as Uber and AirBnB.[25]
Figure 8. Sole proprietors
Sources: Counting of the sole proprietors is from the IRS and that of the nonemploying sole proprietors is from the US Census Bureau; for details refer to text note [23] and [24] respectively; the proportions of those numbers of the employed are calculated by the author by using the BLS's employment statistics.
1. Introduction
The author has addressed on the dissolution of corporate labor in the authors' previous article[1] as such: “The dissolution of corporate labor takes a variety of ways or forms such as: wage restraints, shortened work hours, part time, outsourced and contracted labor, reduction of corporate funding on pensions, increased mobility between jobs and occupations.” The author now attempts to test such a perception to available statistics of the US in this article and will do so as for South Korea in the following article. The US is a huge economy (its portion of world GDP was half in the 50's and has been declining but still is a quarter), most watched because of its influence on other countries and its role as a trend setter, and so is frequently used as a benchmark case. And since the US has a long timer series of economic statistics including employment statistics, it is very good to observe trends in the long term. For example, the Bureau of labor statistics (shortly BLS) in charge of official employment statistics provides employment statistics dating back to 1948 from its website.[2] In addition to that, other official agents such the US Census Bureau and the IRS (Internal Revenue Service) and many research institutions and researchers provide a lot of statistics on the US economy. So the US is a very good case in examining long term trends in the economy in general and of course in employment in specific. This article will draw on the BLS statistics mostly because it is most authoritative and comprehensive sources on employment trend but also on other sources because there is divergence between the BLS statistics and other sources of statistics on the issue of dissolution of corporate labor that is the concern of this article. In an 1989 article, Polivka, BLS staff, dates the concept “contingent employment arrangements" later adopted and modified by the BLS statistics to 1985 when Audrey Freedman used the phrase to describe a trend of “conditional and transitory employment relationships” and she reckons that since then contingent employment has been broadly used to mean other than stereotyped corporate labor such as part-time work, temporary work, employee leasing, self-employment, contracting out and home-based work.[3] However, Polivka gives a critique that such a wide use of the phrase “contingent employment” is misclassification and miss-calculation of contingent workers. For example, part-timer work is not necessarily contingent but a stable employment; or self-employed doctors are hard to be classify “contingent”. Reflecting such critiques onto its survey, the BLS refines “contingent arrangement” into two concepts: “contingent work” for employment of uncertain duration of employment and “alternative employment arrangements” for other relationships than stereotyped employer and employee relationship. And the BLS has implemented the complementary survey to the Current Population Survey six times since 1995.[4] However, there have been critiques that the BLS’s definition and statistics of contingent work and alternative employment arrangements do not capture yest the diversifying trend of employment or work and so consequently other definitions and statistics have been provided, which will be addressed below in this article. And the South Korean statistics bureau named the Statics Korea has developed its own notion of nontraditional workers. part-time workers, temporary workers, and workers with alternative employment arrangements, whose details will be in the following article. So in order to understand the trends for those types of workers as a comparative study, along with contingent workers and workers with alternative employment arrangements of the BLS, part-time workers of the BLS too will be introduced here in this article. The self-employed are also noteworthy because although the self-employed were somewhat a traditional type of work even older than the corporate labor, nowadays they are shed new light on as an alternative employment arrangement as platform labor. And the statistics for the self-employed has been dated quite long both in South Korea and in the US, focusing on the statistics of the self-employed as a separate entry will help to illuminate a long-term trend. Overall, part-time workers, self-employed workers, contingent workers, and workers with alternative employment will be presented as cases of the dissolution of corporate labor in this article. Since the US provides both official and unofficial statistics for those indicators, the US statistics will be introduced in this article first. Relevant Korean statistics will be introduced in the next article.2. Part-time workers and the self-employed: statistics of the BLS
The CPS (Current Population Survey) that is cosponsored by the US Census Bureau and the BLS uses the operational definition of part-time work as workers who usually work less than 35 hours a week[5] and provides the statistics of part-time workers since 1968 at the BLS's website.[6] The proportion of the part time workers to the employed has tended to rise from 14.0 percent in 1968 to 17.5 percent in 2018 (Figure 1). But the rise was not straight but presents ups and downs along the trend. The latest peak of the proportion was 19.7% in 2012 and has been falling since then, which probably reflects the 2008 financial crisis and the consequent recovery and implies a certain degree of elasticity of the proportion of the part time work to the employment to the economic cycle. Figure 1. Part time workers
Note: In the year 1994, the CPS, which is the source of the BLS statistics, was redesigned and so there is a discrepancy of the time series between since 1994 and before 1994. The refinement of part-time work in terms of reasons of voluntary and involuntary choice reveals further the nature of part time work. The BLS also provides part-time work due to two reasons: voluntary (or non-economic reason) and involuntary (or economic reason) at its website.[7] From this data we can see that the proportion of the voluntary part time workers among the employed is much larger than that of involuntary part-time workers and shows rather a steady increasing trend (Fig 2). The proportion of the voluntary part-time workers to employment was about 9.5 percent in 1956 and rose to about 14 percent in 2018. On the other hand, the proportion of the involuntary part-time employment to the total employment does not show an one-sided trend but only fluctuates. And the fact that in the US the proportion of the voluntary part time workers is much larger than that of the involuntary suggests that part time work serves well the need of short work time and has been established as a type of work. As of 2016, the part-time workers have the following characteristics. Women have a higher rate of voluntary part-time work than men; teenagers and old people have lager rates than the age group of 25 to 54; the reason of voluntary part time work is first mostly schooling and second mostly family and personal obligations.[8] Figure 2. Part-time workers: voluntary (noneconomic reason) vs. involuntary (economic reason)

Note: In the year 1994, the CPS, which is the source of the BLS statistics, was redesigned and so there is a discrepancy of the time series between since 1994 and before 1994. The BLS distinguishes the self-employed from other classes of worker: wage and salary employees and unpaid family workers. The self-employed are further refined into unincorporated and incorporated. An unincorporated self-employed person files tax forms as an individual and the incorporated self-employed person file tax forms as an salaried employee working for his or her incorporation. The BLS website provides the time series of the unincorporated self-employed statistics from 1948 and the one of the incorporated self-employed from 2000. As for the chart for the self-employed statistics (Figure 3), the statistics for the unincorporated self-employed is based on the BLS website but the time series of 1994-1999 for the incorporated self-employed draws on a BLS article which has the time span from 1994-2016 and is consistent with the data from the BLS website for 2000-2016.[9] Overall, the proportion of the unincorporated self-employed to that of the total employed declined from about 18 percent in 1948 to about 6 percent in 2018. This decline will be elucidated by decomposing the employment by agriculture and non-agriculture in the next paragraph. On the other hand, the proportion of the incorporated self-employed to the total employment shows a tendency to increase slightly from under four percent in 1994 to slightly over four percent in 2018. As of 2015, the self-employed have the following characteristics. Self-employment rates (the proportion of the self-employed to the total employment) are higher for older workers than for younger workers; higher for men than for women; higher for veterans than for non-veterans.[10] Figure 3. Self-employed: incorporated vs. corporated

Note: In the year 1994, the CPS, which is the source of the BLS statistics, was redesigned and so there is a discrepancy of the time series between since 1994 and before 1994. As mentioned, Figure 4 shows the decomposition of the employment by sector: agricultural and non-agricultural. The self-employed in the agricultural sector, having occupied almost a half of the total employment in 1948, have tended to decrease to almost a tiny level. This is due to the reduction of the number of small farms accompanied by the increase of the number of large farms.[11] The self-employed in the non-agricultural sector had decreased till the 1970s, had increased in the next decade, and have been decreasing since the 1990s. The proportion of the self-employed to the total employment, a little lower than six percent recently, has decreased a little bit from a little over six percent in 1970 around. So the self-employed in the non-agricultural sector has not declined overall but has done so only recently. Figure 4. Self-employed by sector: agricultural and non-agricultural

Sources: The BLS website (bls.gov/data); data retrieved by the author.
Note: In the year 1994, the CPS, which is the source of the BLS statistics, was redesigned and so there is a discrepancy of the time series between since 1994 and before 1994.
3. Contingent employment or alternative employment arrangements: the BLS statistics
As mentioned above, the CPS supplement statistics maintained by the US Census Bureau and sponsored by the BLS captures two aspects of non-stereotyped employment: one about the uncertainty of job duration or contingent employment in the BLS term, and the other about indirect or casual labor contracts or relationship, or alternative employment arrangements in the BLS term.[12] The BLS defines contingent workers as those who do not have an implicit or explicit contract for ongoing employment, excluding those who have option to continue in their jobs but do not continue for personal reasons. And the BLS refines further contingent workers by degree of overage: 'narrow', 'in-between', and 'broad' in the author's naming.[13] (1) The narrow definition of contingent workers means the wage and salary workers who expect their jobs will last for an additional year or less and who had worked at their jobs for one year or less. So Self-employed workers and independent contractors are excluded. (2) The In-between definition of contingent workers means the workers, including the self-employed and independent contractors, who expect their employment to last for an additional year or less and who had worked at their jobs (or been self-employed) for 1 year or less. (3) The broad definition of contingent workers means the workers who do not expect their jobs to last. If you take a look at the statistics of contingent employments, you will find quite a different trend form the common perception: that is, the proportion of contingent workers to the employed remains rather small and tends to even decrease for the past two decades (Figure 5). The broad estimate of the proportion of the contingent workers to the employed are around only 4 percent mostly and tends to decrease. Other estimates are similar in trend and only get smaller by getting down to narrower definitions: for the in-between definition, the estimates are around 2 percent; for the narrow definition, the estimates are around 1.5 percent. In contrast with noncontingent workers, contingent workers are pronounced: in the age group of under 25 (related to school enrollment); in professional, construction and extraction occupations. And more than half of contingent workers prefer permanent jobs.[14] Figure 5. Contingent workers by definition: narrow, in-between, and broad

4. Alternative statistics for non-traditional workers: freelancers, independent workers, and sole proprietors
The seemingly stationary trend of contingent workers shown in the BLS statistics has countered the perception of the dissolution of corporate labor; in particular, that of the widespread use of platform labor or gig labor such as Uber drivers. The contradiction between the perception and the most authoritative BLS statistics has stimulated concerns on the data and entailed many alternative approaches. Alternative approaches can be captured in two types. One is to devise and implement different surveys from those of the BLS. The other is, instead of surveys, to utilize existing tax based data, in the belief that tax reports of non-standard workers would be increasing. Critiques on the CPS (Consumer Population Survey) which is maintained by Census Bureau and co-sponsored with the BLS and utilized for labor force statistics and contingent labor statistics by the BLS can be summarized as follows. (1) the CPS only deals with the primary jobs. (2) the CPS survey's concepts, work and job do not reflect on informal jobs. (3) the BLS survey only covers activities for a limited period (say, a week of every month). Regarding critiques (1) and (2), an article of the BLS written by the BLS’s staffs point that it is not necessarily true that the BLS survey question does not cover secondary jobs or informal jobs though the authors admit that the relevance of the questions to secondary jobs and informal jobs has not been formally tested.[18] The BLS' survey's question on the labor force status is:“The most basic of the labor force questions asks, “LAST WEEK, did you (name) do ANY work for pay (either pay or profit)?” The BLS staff argue that this question already covers both formal and informal jobs, which experts agree on. And they inform that those who answer to Yes to the question are asked further whether they have more than one job (or business) such as part-time, evening, or weekend work and so multiple job holders are also identified. Though we may accept the defense of the staffs of the BLS regarding the critique (1) and (2), we may suspect that the period of work or job asked by the CPS is more fit to the standard type of labor which is supposed to continues yearlong than to the intermittent labor such as gig works. For the purpose of the CPS is to measure the monthly fluctuation of the labor force, not to pick out a particular activity of workers anytime in a year. In order to reflect the different nature of intermittent labor of gig works, some surveys focusing on gig works tend to ask just whether a respondent has any experience of gig works for a year. The Freelancer Union (FU) and the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) are such institutions that define respectively a freelancer or an independent worker in a yearly term and do surveys. The freelance association is a union of freelancers and the McKinsey Global Institute is an arm of McKinsey, a consulting firm. The survey reports of the Edelman Intelligence commissioned by the FU and Upwork defines 'freelancers' as Individuals who have engaged in supplemental, temporary, project- or contract-based work, within the past 12 months.[19] The 2018 survey criticizes that the aforementioned CPS's supplementary surveys of contingent workers and workers with alternative employment arrangements snapshot only those who happen to work in the reference week and so misses those who freelance less frequently than weekly which amounts 42 percent of freelancers. Since the reports commissioned by the FU and Upwork identifies any person who have done any freelancing activities in a year as freelancers, their counting of freelancers is likely to be larger than the CPS's counting of contingent workers and workers with alternative employment arrangements. And actually the counting of freelancers amounts to 50 million and the proportion of the freelancers to the employment, overall tending to increase over the years, is more than 36 percent (Figure 7). The surveys over the years show that freelancers are composed of the following segments in the order of rough size: independent contractors, diversified workers and moonlighters as majors (each around 30% or less) and business owners and temporary workers as minors (each around 5 percent).[20] Figure 7. Freelancers

5. Conclusion
As presented above, this article reviewed several data sets to illuminate trends in nontraditional works: In briefing, all in proportion of the employment, the part-time workers in the BLS's statistics have increased up over half a century by 3 or 4 percent points. The self-employed in the BLS's statistics have decreased by about 10 percent points over 70 decades; the contingent workers and the workers with alternative arrangements in the BLS's statistics are rather slightly decreasing or stationary over two decades around 4 percent (at the maximum definition) or 10 percent respectively; the freelancers in the FU and Upwark's statistics are slightly increasing up to around 36 percent over recent years; the independent workers in the MGI's statistics are very large in size closely to almost 50 percent; the sole proprietors in the IRS's statistics are increasing up to almost 17 percent over two decades It turns out that there is a sharp disparity between the BLS statistics and the other statistics in the trends of such a class of labor dubbed self-employed, freelancers, independent workers, sold proprietors defined in corresponding statistics respectively. Although the definitions are different across statistics, the trends should not be very different in spite of the possibility in size differences, but actually show opposite directions. This respect may buttress the aforementioned hypothesis that the difference in the purposes and consequent definitions of statistics may have brought about the disparity. The CPS (Current Population Survey) which the BLS statistics draws on was designed to reflect more a cyclical change than a structural change and is better suited to measure monthly in-and-out flows of labor force across stereotyped employment pool. Such a monthly measurement referring to a specific week may not capture intermittent works happening occasionally for a year. That may explain why the measurements which summarize a year's activities in other statistics are larger than those for a week's activities in every month as presented by the CPS. This may hint on a possibility that part-time workers may be underestimated by the CPS because some intermittent part-time works which fit well non-traditional works also may be missed by the CPS which is suited for steady part-time works. But the statistics of part-time workers has such a long time span of half a century that it can reveal structural change in work scheduling too, which turns out to be an increasing trend. Likewise, there is a possibility that the time span of the CPS's estimation of contingent workers and workers with alternative employment measurements is yet to short to capture a structural change of diversification of works. Emergence of intermittent works may widen the statistical disparity between the official statistics and other non-official statistics for non-traditional works. So instead of depending only on the official statistics of the labor force, we need to watch out for the unofficial but customized data for the new job trend and interpret it positively and try to draw its policy implications.(*) This article is published in intelligence korea, Summer and Winter, 2020. The Korean version is available at intelligencekor.kr/periodical/article.html?bno=8.
Notes
[1] The article with the title “Institutionalization and dissolution of the twentieth century’s corporate labor”, downloadable at intelligencekor.com/periodical/article.html?bno=2. [2] As for unemployment statistics, in 1928, upon request from Senator Robert Wagner, the BLS provided unemployment statistics. cited from Bloomberg Businessweek, “Robert Shiller on Infectious Narratives in Economics: Excerpt”, October 7, 2019, Asia Edition. [3] Polivka, Anne E, “Defining Contingent Work,” Monthly Labor Review (published by the BLS), December 1989. [4] The Current Population Survey (shortly CPS) is a monthly statistics for labor force sponsored jointly by the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The supplementary survey was intended to be done in every two years but done from 1995 to 2001 but afterward intermittently in 2005 and in 2017 because of budgetary issues. The supplementary survey's dependence on the budget is briefly mentioned in a blog article of the BLS titled, “Why This Counts: Measuring Gig Work”, March 3, 2016. This blog site is named Commissioner's Corner: blogs.bls.gov/blog/2016/03/03/why-this-counts-measuring-gig-work. [5] The cut-off of 35 hours was established in the 1940s. Refer to Megan Dunn, 2018, March, “Who chooses part-time work and why?”, Monthly Labor Review of the BLS, downloadable at www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2018/article/who-chooses-part-time-work-and-why.htm. [6] There is a major methodological change in 1994 in the time series of part-time workers. The BLS provides a further classification of part-times workers: economic (or involuntary) and non-economic (or voluntary). And the BLS, at its website, provides the time series of these refined statistics for an even longer time span beginning in 1956. The sum of the number of voluntary workers and that of involuntary workers does not add up to the number of part-time workers. For part-time work in the survey does not mean actual part-time work for the reference week but a general tendency (expressed as "usually"). Some part-time workers who did not work at all during the survey reference week are not asked about their reasons of part-time but instead asked about the reasons of their absence from work, which is likely to make the sum of the number of voluntary and that of involuntary workers smaller than the number of part-time workers. On the contrary, some workers who want to work full time but had to work part-time because of seasonal nature of work are classified as involuntary work, which is likely to make the sum of the number of voluntary and that of involuntary workers larger than the number of part-time workers. [7] See Note [6] to understand the statistics of voluntary and involuntary part-time work and its possible discrepancy with part-time work in general. [8] Steven F. Hipple and Laurel A. Hammond, “Self-Employment in the United States,” March 2016, Spotlight, BLS, downloaded at https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2016/self-employment-in-the-united-states/home.htm. [9] BLS (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics), “Involuntary part-time work on the rise”, issues in labor statistics, Summary 08-08, December 2008, downloaded at www.bls.gov/opub/btn/archive/involuntary-part-time-work-on-the-rise.pdf. [10] Megan Dunn, “Who chooses part-time work and why?,” Monthly Labor Review, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, March 2018, www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2018/article/who-chooses-part-time-work-and-why.htm. [11] Hipple and Hammond, op. cit. [12] The supplement survey excludes the unpaid family workers. So the size of the employees in the supplement is smaller than that of the employed in general by the size of the unpaid family workers. See BLS, 2018 (Jun.), "Contingent and Alternative Employment Arrangements examined, May 2017", downloadable at www.bls.gov/news_release/archives/conemp_06072018.txt. [13] The definition of contingent workers has been the same since the first survey in 1995 was exercised. So any official BLS news that reports the results of each survey gives the same definition. All the list of relevant news is as follows in the order of publication time:BLS, 1995 (Aug.), "New Data on Contingent and Alternative Employment examined by BLS", downloadable at www.bls.gov/news_release/history/conemp_082595.txt;
BLS, 1997 (Dec.), "Contingent and Alternative Employment Arrangementsexamined, February 1997", downloadable at www.bls.gov/news_release/history/conemp_020398.txt;
BLS, 1999 (Dec.), "Contingent and Alternative Employment Arrangementsexamined, February 1999", downloadable at www.bls.gov/news_release/history/conemp_12211999.txt;
BLS, 2001 (Dec.), "Contingent and Alternative Employment Arrangementsexamined, February 2001", downloadable at www.bls.gov/news_release/history/conemp_05242001.txt;
BLS, 2005 (Dec.), "Contingent and Alternative Employment Arrangementsexamined, February 2005", downloadable at www.bls.gov/news_release/history/conemp_07272005.txt;
BLS, 2018 (Jun.), "Contingent and Alternative Employment Arrangementsexamined, May 2017", downloadable at www.bls.gov/news_release/archives/conemp_06072018.txt. [14] BLS news release, May 2017, op. cit.; the characteristics of contingent workers are similar across the surveys. [15] There is one more kind of alternative employment arrangements, that is, day labors. But they are excluded in the presented statistics because they are a very small group but day labors are included in the sum of the supplement. The independent workers work for employers based on their own contract. The on-call workers are those who are on wait to be called by the employers. The temporary help agency workers are those who are mediated to client employers only temporarily by the help agency; nowadays popular platform labor is a digital version. The workers provided by contract firms are those whose labor contract is with the contract firms, not with client employers, but work for the client employers (BLS, 2018, op. cit.). [16] BLS news release, May 2017, op. cit.; the characteristics of workers with alternative employment arrangements are similar across the surveys. [17] Preferences of workers provided contract firms on their job arrangement are not asked. For it is difficult to phase whether the preference is for the specific contract company or for the contract company work in general, according to Polivka (1989, op. cit.). [18] Refer to Mary Dorinda Allard and Anne E. Polivka, "Measuring labor market activity today: are the words work and job too limiting for surveys?," Monthly Labor Review, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, November 2018, downloadable at margin-top: www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2018/article/measuring-labor-market-activity-today.htm. In this article, they also check the possibility that the CPS may underestimate the numbers of informal workers or multiple job holders, by using another survey called the ATUS (American Time Use Survey, maintained by the Census Bureau and sponsored by the BLS, which records a respondent's daily schedule and conclude that the possibility of underestimation may not be not large. But this survey covers the activities of a respondent only a week in a year, and so it is hard to generalize the results over the whole year. [19] Upwork is a freelancer marketplace. Upwork jointly has commissioned the survey since from 2014, the first year of survey, with the FU. The survey reports are listed in both the FU's website at www.freelancersunion.org/resources/freelancing-in-america and Upwork's website at www.upwork.com/i/freelancing-in-america. [20] From all the survey reports from 2014 to 2018 whose website addresses are in the note [19] above. [21] McKinsey Global Institute, 2015, INDEPENDENT WORK: CHOICE, NECESSITY, AND THE GIG ECONOMY, downloadable at www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/employment-and-growth/independent-work-choice-necessity-and-the-gig-economy. [22] The BLS staffs Allard and Polivka (op. cit.) tell explicitly labor from such activities as selling goods and lease which may bring about capital returns. [23] In the US, sole proprietors, meaning those who have unincorporated business or businesses, file tax returns with the form 1040 as individuals and further submit the Schedule C form as business owners. The IRS provides the statistics for those as follows: IRS, Individual Income Tax Returns, Complete Report, annually so far up to 2017, downloadable at www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-individual-income-tax-returns-publication-1304-complete-report; provided are the reports of the years since 1996, but the report of 1997 misses the relevant information. [24] Counting of the sole proprietors of the nonemployers is from the Census Bureau's Nemployer Statistics, annually so far up to 2017, downloadable at www.census.gov/programs-surveys/nonemployer-statistics.html; the website provides reports of the year 1998 and so on. The Census Bureau filters the IRS' data of nonemploying sole proprietors by limiting their income between a max and a min in the belief that those with too much or too low income cannot be regarded as sole proprietors. For example, those who earn less than 1,000 dollars as business income are excluded except construction because they may have got extra income from more as a hobby than as a business. The maximums may differ across sectors. [25] Ian Hathaway and Mark Muro, 2016, “Tracking the gig economy: New numbers,” Brookings Report, downloadable at www.brookings.edu/research/tracking-the-gig-economy-new-numbers.
