Working-age adults by primary form of employment, 2015
1
% working-age population 15+; million
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McKinsey Global Institute
Independent work: Choice, necessity, and the gig economy
Box 2. Data difficulties in measuring independent work
Independent work may not be a new phenomenon, but it has never found a comfortable
fit within the labor market categories tracked by government agencies or multilateral
institutions such as the ILO. Current data collection on this important segment of the
workforce is insufficient, outdated, and too narrow to capture the full range of economic
activity that is taking place. Improving the available statistics would give policy makers a
better window into how their labor markets are evolving.
Governments in the United States and Europe conduct extensive labor force surveys but
ask people only about their primary employment. In the European Union, both temporary
work and self-employment have been tracked for the past 20 years along with data on
inactivity and reasons for inactivity, part-time employment and reasons for being part time,
and motivations behind temporary work.
The United States tracks self-employment, part-time employment, and contingent work.
But self-employment has been tracked in its current form only since 2000, and it was
previously narrowly defined as only unincorporated self-employment (that is, workers who
are self-employed but have not formed a corporate legal entity). Additionally, the US Bureau
of Labor Statistics has not conducted its Contingent Work Supplement, its primary source
of information about non-payroll jobs, since 2005. In 2015, however, economists Lawrence
Katz and Alan Krueger repeated the Contingent Work Supplement, yielding updated
estimates of the share of the US workforce engaged in what they call “alternative work
arrangements.”
1
This term includes some temporary work and self-employment, although
it has been broadened to include on-call workers, contracted-out workers, independent
contractors, and temporary help agency workers (a definition that differs from the one used
in this report). They found that the share of the US workforce engaged in these types of work
arrangements grew from 10 percent in 2005 to almost 16 percent in 2015. The BLS is now
planning to run the Supplement next year.
It is difficult to make cross-country comparisons since governments use distinct terminology
regarding employment arrangements, forcing researchers to make assumptions if they seek
to compare data sets. For instance, the United States counts independent contractors,
temporary agency or contract workers, on-call workers, and freelancers as “contingent
workers,” a category that overlaps with self-employment. However, the European Union
distinguishes between self-employed persons and broadly defined temporary workers (any
employee whose contract has a defined end date). In this report, we have attempted to
reconcile these differences to make the data comparable.
Finally, official statistics do not capture the full range of independent activity that now takes
place. In particular, government sources do not capture independent work that is done on
a supplemental basis—and as the MGI survey shows, more than half of all independent
earners engage in this way. Official surveys also fail to track whether independent work is
undertaken by choice or out of necessity—a critical piece of knowledge for understanding
whether workers are being “pulled” or “pushed” into independence.
1
See Lawrence Katz and Alan Krueger,
The rise and nature of alternative work arrangements in the United
States, 1995–2015
, March 2016.
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McKinsey Global Institute
1. Sizing the independent workforce
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