Defining the Role of Gig Employment in the Post-Pandemic World of Work and the Curated Data Enterprise

Definitive estimates of gig employment, also known as alternative employment arrangements, vary widely depending on the definitions and sources used. Estimates range from a low of 15 million to a high of 55 million workers. As these estimates demonstrate, refining the definition of gig employment is challenging. Definitions include some mix of individuals who are paid by a temporary help agency or contract company or are on-call workers or independent contractors. The BLS CPS Contingent Worker Supplement (CWS) provides the lower bound for estimates (15 million). These data show little growth in alternative employment arrangements since 2005, likely because the survey’s focus is on collecting data about an individual’s main job. Other surveys and administrative data however have established that gig work is frequently undertaken to supplement income from a traditional job. As a result, official employment data greatly understate the level of gig employment and its increasing prevalence, especially during the pandemic. This is likely due to the inability of single-source surveys to provide data in anything close to real-time. To achieve a better measure, we must make use of multiple data sets derived from governmental and non-governmental surveys, and administrative data, especially if we are to fully understand the size and patterns of change in gig employment.

The Curated Data Enterprise (CDE) is both an infrastructure and a continuously evolving ambition to empower and enable Census Bureau scientists and their data users to develop together new measures of the nation’s people, places, and economy.

The Curated Data Enterprise could facilitate research leading to a common definition and comparable reporting on the gig workforce. In this domain, we do not need to build from scratch, rather it can be informed by multiple studies taking an integrative approach. These studies combine CPS, General Social Survey, Internal Revenue Service administrative data, and smaller surveys conducted by research organizations.

No single data source will suffice to study the rise in gig employment and its many facets. The large number and types of data needed to assess gig employment are ideally suited for the CDE, a data enterprise capable of capturing purposes for data use, as well as the individual data assets themselves.

Salvo J, Shipp S, Zhang S. Defining the Role of Gig Employment in the Post-Pandemic World of Work, Technical Report BI 2022-026. Proceedings of the Biocomplexity Institute, University of Virginia; 2022. https://doi.org/10.18130/wkx0-4y46

This report was funded by U.S. Census Bureau Agreement No. 01-21-MOU-06