According to a recently released report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), 40% of the U.S. workforce is contingent, up from 30% in 2005.
The GAO's definition of contingent covers the broad category of workers who aren't full-time, permanent employees. The GAO includes the following in their definition:
- Agency temps: (1.3%)
- On-call workers (people called to work when needed (3.5%))
- Contract company workers (3.0%)
- Independent contractors who provide a product or service and find their own customers (12.9%)
- Self-employed workers such as shop and restaurant owners, etc. (3.3%)
- Standard part-time workers (16.2%)
Most interesting from our perspective is this suggests that 19.2% of the workforce is self-employed. I get to this number by adding contract company workers, independent contractors and self-employed from the above list.
This is quite a bit higher than the roughly 10% of the workforce the BLS reports. It also helps answer the question asked in the HBR article Where are all the Self-Employed Workers?.
The answer to question of where they are is they are here, but they been classified as traditional employees by the BLS.
The GAO report has been getting a lot of press and the articles below cover the report findings in more detail:
Forbes - Shocker: 40% of Workers Now Have Contingent Jobs, Says U.S. Government
WSJ - New Data Spotlights Changes in the U.S. Workforce
Lexology - New GAO Report Shows 85% of Independent Contractors are Content With Their Employment Type
As regular readers know, we been saying for years self-employment and contingent work are much more common than the official statistics say. It's nice that the GAO agrees.
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.