WASHINGTON — To better measure the changing nature of employment, independent contracting and freelance work, and jobs with unstable hours, a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine recommends that the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) add questions to the Contingent Worker Supplement (CWS) about work done by people who may not be steadily employed, details about secondary jobs, and work scheduling practices.

The nature of work in the U.S. has changed dramatically in recent decades. The growth of alternative work arrangements, including independent contracting and work with unpredictable schedules — which includes many jobs in the retail and hospitality sectors — underscores the need for more accurate measurement of these kinds of employment. Measuring Alternative Work Arrangements for Research and Policy examines the CWS, which was developed to measure trends in temporary and other nontraditional work arrangements as a supplement to the Current Population Survey, the nation’s flagship employment survey. The report offers recommendations to better measure changes in the relationship between workers and employers, predictability of work hours, access to benefits, and the types of secondary jobs people hold.

“With the unprecedented economic disruption seen this year and the continuing impacts of COVID-19, it’s critical for the government to have data that accurately reflect how people are earning money, spending their working hours, and accessing employer benefits like health care,” said Susan Houseman, chair of the committee that wrote the report and vice president and director of research at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. “As work migrates toward a structure that’s less dependent on the traditional ‘employee’ model, data will be essential for formulating policy to fill gaps in the social safety net.”

The report says BLS should test new survey questions to be added to the CWS, including:

• For those who did not report any work in the basic monthly CPS, the CWS should ask questions that probe into occasional work to supplement household income over a longer reference period.
• For respondents reporting only one job, the CWS should ask about additional work activity, including if respondents did anything for pay beyond their main job over a longer reference period. 
• For respondents with more than one job, the CWS should ask about information on selected characteristics of the secondary jobs including whether the job is a self-employment or independent contractor arrangement, its hours and earnings, variability in hours, and the main reason for holding the second job. 
• For respondents who are employees of an organization, the CWS should expand questions about how work schedules are determined to identify unpredictable hours and earnings.

The report recommends that the CWS continue to ask questions about independent contractors and platform or app work. However, the questions should use a broad definition of independent contractors to better capture a variety of work arrangements, including informal jobs, in which the individual is not an employee.

The study — undertaken by the Committee on Contingent Work and Alternative Work Arrangements — was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor.

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine are private, nonprofit institutions that provide independent, objective analysis and advice to the nation to solve complex problems and inform public policy decisions related to science, technology, and medicine. They operate under an 1863 congressional charter to the National Academy of Sciences, signed by President Lincoln.

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