The Role of Unemployment in the Rise in Alternative Work Arrangements

Abstract

Much evidence indicates that the traditional nine-to-five employee-employer relationship is in decline. Although comprehensive, high-frequency data on US work arrangements are not available, the trend appears to have begun before the advent of the platform economy and the spread of online gig work. We have updated the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) Contingent Worker Supplement (CWS) to the Current Population Survey (CPS) by adding a similar CWS survey to the RAND American Life Panel (ALP) in 2015 (henceforth RAND-CWS), and found that the share of the workforce engaged in an “alternative work arrangement” on their main job, such as working as a self-employed freelancer or working for a contract firm that contracts out employees to other companies, has grown from 10.7 percent in 2005 to 15.8 percent in 2015 (Katz and Krueger 2016).