The Rise and Nature of Alternative Work Arrangements in the United States, 1995–2015

By Lawrence F. Katz, Alan B. Krueger. ILR Review, 2016

951 citations recorded by the source corpus.

To monitor trends in alternative work arrangements, the authors conducted a version of the Contingent Worker Survey as part of the RAND American Life Panel in late 2015. Their findings point to a rise in the incidence of alternative work arrangements in the US economy from 1995 to 2015. The percentage of workers engaged in alternative work arrangements—defined as temporary help agency workers, on-call workers, contract workers, and independent contractors or freelancers—rose from 10.7% in February 2005 to possibly as high as 15.8% in late 2015. Workers who provide services through online intermediaries, such as Uber or TaskRabbit, accounted for 0.5% of all workers in 2015. Of the workers selling goods or services directly to customers, approximately twice as many reported finding customers through off-line intermediaries than through online intermediaries.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/61a90bdb0022c993f634fff3f01fe8b2c01dd802

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Citations in the corpus

Good Jobs, Bad Jobs in the Gig Economy (2016, background): “Although it is still a relatively small slice of the American economy (Katz and Krueger 2016), it is growing rapidly.”
The Role of Surge Pricing on a Service Platform with Self-Scheduling Capacity (2017, background): “(See Katz and Krueger (2016) for data on the growth of alternative work arrangements in the United States.)”
Does the sharing economy increase inequality within the eighty percent?: findings from a qualitative study of platform providers (2017, background): “A 2016 study of the rise of alternative work arrangements (Katz and Krueger, 2016) found that between 2005 and 2015 the fraction of the labour force in non-standard work rose from 10.1 to 15.8%, and that non-standard work accounted for the entire net gain in employment over this period.”
An Analysis of the Labor Market for Uber’s Driver-Partners in the United States (2018, positive): “Katz and Krueger (2016) extended the findings of BLS’s CWS by including a subset of the questions on alternative work arrangements on the Rand American Life Panel in fall 2015.”
Expanding the Impact of the Psychology of Working: Engaging Psychology in the Struggle for Decent Work and Human Rights (2019, background): “The rise of precarious work has complicated the recovery following the Great Recession and has strongly shaped the nature of the jobs that have been created since the advent of the fiscal meltdown (Kalleberg & Vallas, 2017; Katz & Krueger, 2016).”
Uber happy? Work and well-being in the ‘Gig Economy’ (2019, background): “In our view, this provides one plausible explanation for the fact that a growing share of workers are trading the benefits associated with a traditional nine-to-five job for work in the gig economy, even if the latter oftentimes provides less protection, stability, and lower monetary rewards (e.g., ”
Precarious jobs: Where are they, and how do they affect well-being? (2017, methodology): “A preliminary analysis of data from the RAND-Princeton Contingent Worker Survey, that replicates the US Contingent Work Survey for 2015, points to a continuation of this trend, with alternative work arrangements4 increasing by 50% between 2005 and 2015 (Katz and Krueger, 2016: 7).”
Online labour index: Measuring the online gig economy for policy and research (2018, positive): “The significant difference in the figures reported by Huws and Joyce (2016) and Katz and Krueger (2016) could be explained by the inclusion of non-traditional payment channels by the former, or by US-UK national differences, but they could also be explained by other methodological differences and…”
The “sharing” economy: labor, inequality, and social connection on for‐profit platforms (2017, background): “A recent study by Katz and Krueger (2016) finds that all net employment growth between 2005 and 2015 was in alternative, that is, nonstandard, work arrangements and that online intermediaries are now “employing” a full half percent of all workers.”
The future of skills: employment in 2030 (2017, background): “5 per cent of workers sell services through online platform (Katz and Krueger, 2016).”
The Value of Flexible Work: Evidence from Uber Drivers (2019, neutral): “In contrast, the “active” state is probably an underestimate of labor supply because it includes minutes on trip en route to obtain a passenger but does not include minutes in which the driver is waiting to be matched with a passengers.”