A category defined by what it is not
Sociology gave work hired by the day a statistical home in the 1990s, and the home was a residual category. Anything that departed from continuous full-time employment with one employer went into a single container labelled nonstandard. The label made the work countable. It also made several very different arrangements look like one thing.
Where the category came from
The reference study is Arne Kalleberg, Barbara Reskin and Ken Hudson's Bad Jobs in America, published in the American Sociological Review in 2000. Working from the Current Population Survey supplement on contingent and alternative employment arrangements, the authors sorted the American workforce into standard full-time work and a set of alternatives: regular part-time work, on-call work and day labour, temporary help agency assignments, work for contract companies, independent contracting and other self-employment. Each arrangement was then tested against three markers of job quality — low earnings, no health coverage, no pension.
The headline result was that nonstandard arrangements carried a higher probability of all three. The finding underneath it was more interesting and less quoted: the spread within the category was enormous. Independent contractors did comparatively well on earnings; on-call workers and agency temps did badly on everything. A single number for nonstandard work averaged over a group whose members had little in common beyond failing to match a template.
The template itself
Kalleberg returned to the problem in his 2009 address to the American Sociological Association and at length in Good Jobs, Bad Jobs in 2011, where the standard employment relationship is treated as a historical settlement rather than a natural state — a postwar arrangement, concentrated in particular industries and particular workforces, that was never extended to much of agriculture, domestic service or casual construction. That qualification matters for the arithmetic. Measuring work against a norm that large parts of the labour market never occupied turns a description of difference into an implied narrative of decline.
Guy Standing pushed the framing further in 2011 by treating the precariat as an emerging class. The response from within sociology was largely sceptical, on the grounds that a group assembled from such heterogeneous positions lacks the shared relationship to production that class analysis requires. The dispute is unresolved, and it is a dispute about categories rather than about data.
A series with holes in it
The empirical side has its own difficulty. The Contingent Worker Supplement that made the 2000 study possible was fielded several times between 1995 and 2005, then dropped, and not run again until 2017. For twelve years the best instrument for measuring these arrangements simply did not exist, which is precisely the period in which platform-mediated work grew.
What filled the gap illustrates the hazard. Lawrence Katz and Alan Krueger used a privately commissioned survey to estimate that alternative work arrangements had expanded substantially between 2005 and 2015, and the estimate circulated widely. When the official supplement returned in 2017 showing little change, the two authors revisited their own work and published a revised, considerably smaller estimate, attributing much of the original gap to differences in survey instrument and timing. Few reversals in labour statistics are so cleanly documented by the people who made the first claim.
What survives
The durable lesson is not that the numbers were wrong. It is that this category behaves badly under aggregation: measurement of work defined by absence depends on the instrument to an unusual degree, and any figure quoted without its instrument and its year is close to meaningless.
References
- Kalleberg, A. L., Reskin, B. F. and Hudson, K. (2000). Bad jobs in America. American Sociological Review, 65(2).
- Kalleberg, A. L. (2009). Precarious work, insecure workers. American Sociological Review, 74(1).
- Kalleberg, A. L. (2011). Good Jobs, Bad Jobs. Russell Sage Foundation.
- Standing, G. (2011). The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. Bloomsbury.
- Katz, L. F. and Krueger, A. B. (2019). Understanding trends in alternative work arrangements in the United States. RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 5(5).
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