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Appendix: Technical notes
4. ESTIMATING THE GROWTH POTENTIAL OF THE INDEPENDENT
WORKFORCE BASED ON ASPIRATIONS STATED IN SURVEY RESPONSES
Building on our estimate of the current size of the independent workforce and the
classification of independent workers into four specific quadrants, we conducted a
more detailed follow-up analysis of people’s desired sources
of income to see how the
independent workforce might develop in the future. The basic premise is that future
growth will be driven by the desire of traditional workers and people not currently working
to become independent, although that will be offset by the desire of some independent
workers to exit the independent workforce. In this section, we look at the relative magnitude
of both of these forces and estimate their net effect.
While this analysis is closely related to the choice vs. necessity classification described
above, this analysis considers all working-age respondents rather than just workers. We
also take into account the fact that a person could be independent
by choice but still want
to change the role independent work plays in their livelihood (e.g., they may want to turn
a supplemental earning activity into their primary living or vice versa). Even a person who
performs supplemental work out of necessity (that is, they would prefer traditional work as
their secondary source of income) could still want to remain in the independent workforce
and become a free agent. Similar to the previous analysis, however, we will only consider
people’s preferences as they relate to providing labor.
To capture all the different ways someone’s current working
situation can differ from
their aspirations, we built an exhaustive transition matrix for four specific groups: primary
independent workers, supplemental independent workers, traditional workers, and
people not currently working. The current state of each respondent follows the definitions
described in the previous section. Their desired future state is based on their answers to
“What is your primary/secondary desired source of income?” Throughout the analysis,
we interpret the answers “working as a freelancer,” “working in my own business,” and
“working as a temporary employee” as a desire to be independent. We interpret “working
as a permanent employee” as a desire to be traditional. Any other response (which, for most
people, was “retirement”) was taken as a desire to not work at all.
We considered primary
independent workers who reported that they were already following their desire as wanting
to be independent regardless of the answer they chose. For consistency, we did the same in
the case of traditional workers: as long as they responded they were already pursuing their
desired primary source of income, we assumed their desire is to stay traditional.
We then applied the following logic:
A person has a desire to be a primary independent worker if their response to “What is
your primary desired source of income?” was a form of independent work. Their desired
secondary source of income is irrelevant since they would still
be primary independent
workers even if they added more independent income on the side.
A person has a desire to be a supplemental independent worker if they do not want to be
a primary independent worker, and their response to “What is your secondary desired
source of income?” was a form of independent work.
For everyone who did not fall into the previous two groups, we looked at whether they
expressed a desire to do traditional work as either their primary or secondary source
of income.
Based on that criterion, we divided the group into people with a desire to be
traditional and those who want to stop working altogether.
While this approach was fully exhaustive, it introduced a risk of overestimating how many
people would transition into another type of work since what people want is often very
different from what they actually do. To provide a more realistic estimate of the future size
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Independent work: Choice,
necessity, and the gig economy
of the independent workforce, we asked respondents follow-up questions about how likely
they were to pursue their preferred options. They could choose an answer on a 7-point scale
ranging from “definitely will not” to “already doing.” We then repeated the logic described
above, considering two groups of responses: “very likely to pursue” and above, as well
as “somewhat likely” and above. These two groups of responses
became the basis of a
range of estimates for future growth, with the more exclusive group forming the low (more
conservative) end of the range and the “somewhat likely” and above group forming the high
end of the range. Finally, some respondents answered that they were less than somewhat
likely to pursue both their primary and secondary desires. We excluded those responses
from our analysis in order to keep our estimates conservative. They became part of the
“other” category along with traditional workers and people not currently working.
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