Monthly Labor Review October 1996 3

Contingent Workers Defined

Anne E. Polivka is a

research economist in

the Office of Employment Research and

Program Develpment,

Bureau of Labor

Statistics.

Contingent workers have no explicit or implicit contract

for a long-term employment arrangement;

depending on how measured, there were as many

as 6 million contingent workers in February 1995

Contingent and alternative

work arrangements, defined

Has the era of lifetime jobs in the United

States vanished and, in its stead, a “justin-time” age of “disposable” workers

appeared? Even though the majority of studies

have found no change in workers’ overall job tenure, reports of corporate downsizing, production

streamlining, and increasing use of temporary

workers have caused many to question employers’ commitment to long term, stable employment relationships.1 There also is a growing

sense that employers, in their attempts to reduce

costs, have increased their use of employment intermediaries such as temporary help services and

contract companies and are relying more on alternative staffing arrangements such as on-call

workers and independent contractors.

This article discusses the definitions of contingent workers and alternative work arrangements used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to

analyze data from a special supplement to the

Current Population Survey (CPS), and presents

aggregate estimates of the number of workers in

each group thus identified. This analysis is

supplemented with data on workers in alternative employment arrangements from the 1994

National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY).

The article concludes with a discussion of the

overlap between contingent workers and workers in alternative arrangements.

Subsequent articles in this issue use the CPS

data to develop profiles of contingent workers

and workers in alternative arrangements, examine the wages and nonwage benefits these workers receive, and explore contingent and alternative workers’ preferences for and transitions into

their current arrangements.2 An article using

NLSY data to examine changes in wages and

hours for those who switched jobs, and the influence of life events, such as the birth of a child, on

the likelihood of later working in a full-time, parttime, or alternative employment arrangement is

also included in this issue.

Defining contingent work

The term “contingent work” was first coined by

Audrey Freedman at a 1985 conference on employment security to describe a management

technique of employing workers only when there

was an immediate and direct demand for their

services.3 Within a few years of its initial usage,

however, the term came to be applied to a wide

range of employment practices including parttime work, temporary help service employment,

employee leasing, self-employment, contracting

out, employment in the business services sector,

and home-based work. In fact, to some, virtually

any work arrangement that might differ from the

commonly perceived norm of a full-time wage

and salary job would fall under the rubric of contingent work. Although these employment practices are interesting to study in their own right,

referring to them as contingent work causes many

workers to be misclassified and many analysts to

be confused about what exactly is being described or studied.

For instance, while working part time certainly is different from working 40 hours a week

from nine to five, being part time does not in of

itself denote a contingent employment relationAnne E. Polivka
4 Monthly Labor Review October 1996

Contingent Workers Defined

ship. In fact, in January 1991, half of all part-time workers

aged 25 and older had been with their employer at least 3.3

years and, in February 1995, the mean years of job tenure for

part-time workers 25 and older was 6.8 years. Also, according to the February 1995 supplement, 65.8 percent of workers in the business services industry were full-time wage and

salary employees. On the other hand, some workers who are

clearly temporary, such as those who are directly hired to meet

an increase in demand during holidays, would be missed by

an analysis confined to employment in the temporary help

supply industry.

To return the focus to the transitory nature of the employment relationship and to identify a common underlying characteristic with which to classify workers, BLS in 1989 developed the following conceptual definition of contingent work:

“Contingent work is any job in which an individual does not

have an explicit or implicit contract for long-term employment.”4

 In essence, a contingent worker was defined as anyone who was in a job currently structured to be of limited

duration.

Counting contingent workers

In operationalizing the BLS definition of contingent work,

several pieces of information were collected in the February

1995 supplement to the CPS from which such a transitory arrangement could be discerned. These included whether the

worker’s reported job was temporary or not expected to continue, how long the worker expected to be able to hold the

job, and how long the worker had held the job. For workers

who had a job with an intermediary, such as a temporary help

firm or a contract company, information was collected about

their employment at the place they were assigned to work by

the intermediary and about their employment with the intermediary itself.

The key factor used to determine if a job fit the conceptual

definition of contingent work was whether the job was temporary or not expected to continue. The first questions of the

supplement were:

1. Some people are in temporary jobs that last only for a

limited time or until the completion of a project. Is your

job temporary?

2. Provided the economy does not change and your job performance is adequate, can you continue to work for your

current employer as long as you wish? 5

Respondents who answered “yes” to the first question, or

“no” to the second, were then asked a series of questions to

distinguish people who were in temporary jobs from those

who, for personal reasons, were temporarily holding jobs that

offered the opportunity of ongoing employment. For example,

college students working part time in fast-food restaurants

during their summer vacations might view these jobs as temporary, because they intend to leave them at the conclusion

of their vacations. The jobs themselves, however, would continue to be filled by other workers once they left, and thus the

jobs would not be contingent.

Jobs were defined as being short term or temporary if the

worker was working only until the completion of a specific

project, was temporarily replacing another worker, was hired

for a fixed time period, was filling a seasonal job that was

available only during certain times of the year, or if other

business conditions dictated that the job was short term. Individuals who expected to work at their current job for a year

or less for personal reasons, such as returning to school, retiring, or obtaining another job, were asked if they could continue working at their jobs were it not for these personal reasons. If the job could not have continued, these workers also

were classified as having a temporary job.

In addition to being asked whether they perceived of

their jobs as temporary or not lasting as long as they might

have wished, respondents also were asked how long they expected to stay in their current jobs and how long they had

been with their current employer. The rationale for asking

how long an individual expected to remain in his or her current job was that being able to hold a job for a year or more

could be taken as evidence of at least an implicit contract for

ongoing employment. In other words, the employer’s need

for the worker’s services is not likely to evaporate tomorrow.

By the same token, the information on how long a worker

had been with an employer indicates whether a job has been

ongoing. Having remained with an employer for more than a

year may be taken as evidence that, at least in the past, there

was an explicit or implicit contract for continuing employment. Exhibit 1 contains the questions respondents were actually asked and indicates the path wage and salary employees could have taken through the first part of the February

1995 supplement.

To assess the impact of altering some of the defining factors on the estimated size of the contingent work force,

three measures of contingent employment were developed.

Under estimate 1, which is the narrowest, contingent workers were defined as wage and salary workers who indicated

that they expected to work in their current jobs for 1 year or

less and who had worked for their current employer for 1

year or less. Self-employed workers, both incorporated and

unincorporated, and independent contractors were excluded

from the count of contingent workers under estimate 1. The

rationale for their exclusion was that people who work for

themselves by definition have an ongoing employment arrangement, albeit with themselves. Individuals who worked

for temporary help firms or contract companies were consid-
Monthly Labor Review October 1996 5
6 Monthly Labor Review October 1996

Contingent Workers Defined

criteria, there were 6.0 million contingent workers in February 1995, 4.9 percent of the work force.

Comparing CPS and previous measures

The February 1995 supplement to the CPS offered the first

comprehensive and unified measure of the number of contingent workers in the U.S. work force. Prior to the supplement,

analysts tried with only limited success to obtain a measure

of the number of contingent workers by combining data from

various sources. For example, one analyst tried to obtain an

estimate of the size of the contingent work force by adding

the number of workers in business services and a fraction of

employment in the temporary help supply industry from the

Current Employment Statistics survey to the number of selfemployed workers and workers on part-time schedules as

measured in the CPS. Using data from these various sources,

this analyst projected that between 25 percent and 30 percent

of the work force were contingent.6 However, as was argued

above, being a worker in one of these categories does not

necessarily make one contingent. Classifying workers on the

basis of characteristics that are not directly related to contingency may misclassify many individuals who are actually in

long-term, stable work arrangements. For example, using the

BLS estimates of contingency presented above, the proportion of part-time workers who were contingent in February

1995 only ranged from 5 percent to 11 percent, and of all

workers who were in business services—which would include individuals working in advertising, credit reporting and

collection, computer and data processing services, research

and development, and management consulting—only 12.8

percent were contingent under the broadest definition in the

February 1995 survey.

In addition, combining workers in various categories and

using data from different sources resulted in double and even

triple counting of some workers. For instance, according to

the February 1995 CPS, one-fifth of those who worked for

temporary help firms were part-time workers and 15.1 percent of the self-employed worked part time. In addition, 11.8

percent of the self-employed were in the services industry, a

subset of the self-employed that partially overlaps those who

were working part time. Combining all these groups together

as if they were mutually exclusive artificially inflates the estimates of the number of contingent workers in the U.S. labor

force. Still, far more than the double and triple counting, the

definition of contingency as relating specifically to the permanence of the employment arrangement separates the BLS

estimates from previous ones.

Alternative work arrangements

Researchers studying the nature of employment relationships

in the United States also are interested in employees in alterered contingent under estimate 1 only if they expected their

employment arrangement with the temporary help or contract company to last for 1 year or less and they had worked

for that company for 1 year or less. In other words, for these

individuals, employment under estimate 1 was defined with

respect to their temporary help or contract company. Consequently, workers employed by a temporary help company were

not considered contingent if they expected to be able to stay

with their temporary help company for more than a year or

had been with that company for that amount of time, even if

the places they were assigned to work by the company changed

frequently. Under this definition, 2.7 million workers—2.2

percent of the work force—were in contingent arrangements.

Estimate 2 expands the measure of the contingent work

force by including the self-employed, both incorporated and

unincorporated, and independent contractors who expected

to be and had been in such employment arrangements for 1

year or less. (The questions asked of the self-employed were

different from those asked of wage and salary workers featured in exhibit 1.) In addition, temporary help and contract

company workers were classified as contingent under estimate 2 if they had worked and expected to work for the customers to whom they were assigned for 1 year or less. In other

words, actual and expected job tenure was measured from the

perspective of where individuals were working. For example,

consider a “temp” secretary who is sent to a different customer each week but has worked for the same temporary help

firm for more than a year and expects to be able to continue

with the temporary help firm indefinitely. Under estimate 1

this individual would not be counted as contingent, but under

estimate 2, this individual would be counted as contingent. In

contrast, a “temp” who was assigned to a single client for more

than a year and expects to be able to stay with that client for

more than a year is not counted as contingent under either

estimate. Using this definition, 3.4 million workers—2.8 percent of the work force—were in contingent arrangements.

Estimate 3, the broadest measure of contingency, removes

the 1-year requirement on both expected duration of the job

and current job tenure for wage and salary workers. Consequently, this estimate effectively includes all wage and salary

workers who do not expect their jobs to last. For instance, a

wage and salary employee who had held a job for 5 years

could be considered contingent if he or she now viewed the

job as temporary for reasons related to the structure of the

job. These conditions on expected and current tenure were

not relaxed for the self-employed and independent contractors because they were asked a different set of questions from

wage and salary workers. As in estimate 2, only the self-employed and independent contractors who had been self-employed or independent contractors for a year or less and expected to remain in such an arrangement for a year or less

were counted as contingent in the third definition. Using these
Monthly Labor Review October 1996 7

native work arrangements. These are defined either as individuals whose employment is arranged through an employment intermediary such as a temporary help firm, or individuals whose place, time, and quantity of work are potentially unpredictable. The February 1995 CPS supplement

measures workers in four such arrangements: independent

contractors, on-call workers, workers paid by temporary help

firms, and workers whose services are provided through contract firms.7

 The 1994 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth

(NLSY) identifies workers age 29 to 37 who were independent

contractors and temporary help agency employees at the time

they were interviewed or in their most recent previous job.

I

n the February 1995 CPS supplement, all individuals who

identified themselves as independent contractors, consultants, and freelance workers were classified as independent

contractors regardless of whether they were identified as wage

and salary workers or self-employed in response to the monthly

CPS labor force status questions. In asking the self-employed

if they were independent contractors, an attempt was being

made to distinguish the self-employed—both the incorporated

and unincorporated—who considered themselves to be independent contractors, consultants, or freelance workers from

those self-employed who were business operators such as shop

owners or restaurateurs. Among those identified as independent contractors, 85 percent were identified as self-employed

in the main questionnaire, while 15 percent were identified as

wage and salary workers.8 Conversely, about half of the selfemployed—incorporated and unincorporated combined—

identified themselves as independent contractors. Overall,

approximately 8.3 million workers were identified as independent contractors in the February 1995 CPS supplement,

which is equivalent to 6.7 percent of total employment.

In the NLSY, 2.0 percent of those who were interviewed

were identified as independent contractors or consultants. The

CPS estimate for those 29 to 37 years old, the equivalent age

group to the NLSY, was 6.2 percent in February 1995. The

difference between these estimates is probably due to differences in the questions, differences in relative sample sizes,

the extended time frame over which the NLSY data were collected as opposed to the single month in which the CPS data

were collected, and other survey differences. For example, in

the NLSY all individuals in alternative work arrangements were

identified through the question: “Are you a regular employee

at this job, do you consider yourself a temp worker, a consultant, or contractor, or are you an employee of a contractor? By

‘THIS JOB,’ we mean the one you are actually doing the work

for NOT a temporary agency or a consulting or contracting

firm that may have sent you there at first.” In the CPS, wage

and salary workers were identified as independent contractors through the question: “Last week, were you working as

an independent contractor, an independent consultant, or a

freelance worker? That is, someone who obtains customers

on their own to provide a product or service?,” while those

identified as self-employed in the main CPS were asked: “Are

you self-employed as an independent contractor, independent

consultant, freelance worker, or something else such as a shop

or restaurant owner?”

Another difference is that CPS data were collected for the

job held during the week of February 12th to 18th, 1995. The

majority of NLSY data were collected for jobs held during the

time period from June to October 1994, although some of the

information collected referred to jobs that had ended sometime in 1993. Finally, the CPS collects data for approximately

120,000 individuals per month. In February 1995, information was collected for 20,324 individuals between the ages of

29 to 37.9 The NLSY sample consists of 8,891 respondents

including an oversample of blacks and Hispanics. NLSY respondents were first interviewed in 1979 and, by and large,

have been interviewed once a year since.

After independent contractors, the next largest group of

workers in alternative work arrangements as measured by the

CPS was on-call workers. On-call workers are individuals who

are called into work only when needed. Examples of on-call

workers are substitute teachers, nurses, and construction workers hired through union hiring halls. Individuals with regularly scheduled work, which might include periods of being

“on call” to perform work at unusual hours, such as medical

residents, should not be classified as on-call workers. In the

CPS, on-call workers were identified through the following

question: “Some people are in a pool of workers who are ONLY

called to work as needed, although they can be scheduled to

work for several days or weeks in a row, for example substitute teachers, and construction workers supplied by a union

hiring hall. These people are sometimes referred to as ONCALL workers. Were you an ON-CALL worker last week?”

Through this question, 1.6 percent of the employed in February 1995, or 2.0 million workers, were identified as on-call

workers.

Perhaps the group of workers in alternative arrangementsthat has received the most attention is temporary help service workers.10 In the February CPS, temporary help agency

workers were identified through two questions. Individuals

who said their jobs were temporary were asked: “Are you

paid by a temporary help agency?” Those who did not say

that their jobs were temporary were asked: “Even though you

told me your job is not temporary, were you paid by a temporary help agency?” The latter question was added to capture

individuals who did not consider their jobs to be temporary

even though their employment was arranged through a temporary help firm. Approximately 20 percent of those who said

that they were paid by temporary help agencies did not identify their jobs as being temporary or jobs at which they could

not stay as long as they wished. The phrase “paid by a temporary help agency” was used to avoid confusion caused by the
8 Monthly Labor Review October 1996

Contingent Workers Defined

phrases “work for”and “employed by”

among individuals who considered

their employers to be the client to whom

they were assigned rather than the temporary help agency. It is interesting to

note that in response to the main CPS

questions: “Were you employed by

government, by a private company, a

non-profit organization, or were you

self-employed?” and subsequent industry questions, approximately 56 percent

of the temporary help workers identified in the supplement provided information related to their customers rather

than the temporary help firm.11 Using

these questions, 1.2 million workers

were identified as temporary help

agency workers in February 1995, or

approximately 1.0 percent of all those

employed.12

In the NLSY, after the initial question, unstructured followup probing was conducted by the interviewers to determine

whether individuals who identified themselves as “temp

workers” were employed by a temporary help agency. NLSY

estimates indicate that approximately 0.9 percent of the employed in the relevant age groups were temporary help agency

workers, whereas for the same age group, the CPS estimates

indicate that, in February 1995, 1.1 percent of the employed

were temporary help agency workers. Again, differences between CPS estimates and NLSY estimates are probably due to

differences in the time frame over which questions were

asked,13 and wording differences, along with other sample

and methodological differences.

The final group of workers identified as being in an alternative arrangement were contract company workers. In the

February CPS supplement, to be identified as a contract company worker an individual had to usually have only one customer and usually work at the customer’s worksite. The last

two requirements were imposed to avoid classifying as contract workers individuals who worked for companies that

obtained contracts to carry out work assignments such as advertising agencies, military equipment manufacturers, lawyers, or employees of economic “think tanks.” Rather, the

intent was to identify individuals whose employment could

be said to be intermediated through a contract company. Using these criteria, there were 652,000 workers identified as

contract company employees in February 1995, or 0.5 percent of the employed.

It is important to note that, although interest in workers in

alternative arrangements is relatively recent and there has

been a dearth of data to quantify the number of workers in

these arrangements, some of these alternative arrangements

Table 1.

Alternative

arrangements Estimate 1 Estimate 2 Estimate 3

Total

(thousands)

Noncontingent

workers1

Contingent workers

Employed workers with alternative arrangements by contingent and

noncontingent employment, February 1995

Independent contractor ............ 8,309 (2) 3.8 3.8 96.2

On-call workers ........................ 1,968 17.6 18.0 35.2 64.8

Temporary help agency

workers ................................... 1,181 39.4 48.0 66.5 33.5

Workers provided by

contract firms .......................... 652 7.7 11.7 19.8 80.2

Workers with non-alternative

arrangements3 ........................ 111,052 1.6 1.8 3.6 96.4

1 Noncontingent workers are those who do not fall into any estimate of “contingent” workers. 

2 Independent contractors, as well as the self-employed, are excluded from estimate 1.

3

 Workers with non-alternative arrangements are those who do not fall into any of the “alternative arrangements” categories.

NOTE: Detail by type of arrangement may not sum to totals because a small number of workers may be

both “on call” and provided by contract firms. Also, detail may not sum to totals due to rounding.

have been in existence for decades. The ranks of independent

contractors include construction workers and farm hands

working in arrangements that have evolved little in the last

century. On-call workers include substitute teachers, registered nurses, and performance artists, three other relatively

old professions in which the manner of obtaining work has

changed relatively little. On the other hand, temporary help

agencies only trace their widespread existence in the United

States to shortly after World War II.14 There also is evidence

that the provision of employees to fulfill the administrative

or business needs of other companies is a spreading phenomenon.15 Consequently, given the diversity of the origin and

length of time the various alternative arrangements have been

in place, it would be inaccurate to automatically ascribe the

existence of each of these arrangements to evolving labor

markets.

AS NOTED ABOVE, not all workers in alternative work arrangements meet the definition of being contingent, and not all

contingent workers were in alternative work arrangements.

Table 1 presents the proportion of workers in the various alternative work arrangements who were contingent. Under the

broadest estimate of contingency (estimate 3), the majority

of employees of temporary help firms were in contingent jobs

and a substantial proportion of on-call workers were contingent. However, only about 20 percent of contract company

workers and 4 percent of independent contractors were

contingent.

Looking at the data another way, independent contractors,

on-call workers, temporary help workers, and contract company workers who were also contingent accounted for only

31.2 percent of all contingent workers under the broadest es-
Monthly Labor Review October 1996 9

timate. It does not necessarily follow that a firm’s use of workers in alternative arrangements matches one for one the number of workers in contingent arrangements or automatically

shifts the job tenure distribution toward the lower end. Individuals in alternative arrangements such as contract company

workers, independent contractors, and on-call workers, instead of developing a stable relationship with the firms for

which they are providing services, could instead be developing stable relationships with the contract company or the occupation inherent in their employment arrangement.

Footnotes

1

 For analysis of changes in job tenure, see Henry S. Farber, “Are Lifetime Jobs Disappearing? Job Duration in the United States: 1973–1993,”

National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 5014, February

1995; Francis Diebold, David Neumark, and Daniel Polsky, “Job Stability in

the United States,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper

No. 4859, September 1994; and Kenneth Swinnerton and Howard Wial, “Is

Job Stability Declining in the U.S. Economy? Reply to Diebold, Neumark

and Polsky,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review, January 1996. For discussions of the perception of job security, see the series of articles: “The

Downsizing of America,” in The New York Times, Mar. 3, 1996 to Mar. 9,

1996; Lance Morrow, “The Temping of America,” Time, Mar. 29,1993; and

Janice Castro, “Disposable Workers,” Time, March 29,1993. Other assessments of economic security include “Whatever happened to economic anxiety? Business Week, Sept. 23, 1996:” and “Is America’s economy really failing?” The American Enterprise, July/August 1996.

2

 The authors of the CPS articles thank Thomas Nardone of the Bureau of

Labor Statistics for guidance in developing and writing these articles.

3

 Testimony of Audrey Freedman before the Employment and Housing

Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations, House of Representatives, Congress of the United States, May 19, 1988.

4. See Anne E. Polivka and Thomas Nardone, “On the definition of “contingent work’,” Monthly Labor Review, December 1989, pp. 9–16.

5

 The second question was asked because not all people who are in jobs

that are of uncertain, but limited, duration necessarily would identify their

jobs as temporary. The phrase “provided the economy does not change” was

placed in the question in order to explicitly try to measure individuals who

were in jobs that were structured to be short term as opposed to just obtaining a measure of how people felt about the overall economy and the prospects of a recession affecting their employment. For individuals holding more

than one job, the questions throughout the supplement refer to their main

job.

6

 Richard Belous, The Contingent Economy: The Growth of the Temporary, Part-time and Subcontracted Workforce (Washington, DC, National

Planning Association, 1989).

7

 Neither temporary nor part-time workers hired directly by an employer

are considered to be in alternative work arrangements. These workers are

not classified as being in alternative work arrangements because their employment is not arranged through an employment intermediary and, while

employed, the place, time, and quantity of their work are not unpredictable.

For a discussion about the measurement and an estimate of “direct hire temps”

that can be derived from the CPS supplement, see Anne Polivka, “Are Temporary Help Workers Substitutes for Direct Hire Temps? Searching for an

Alternative Explanation of Growth in the Temporary Help Industry,” paper

presented at the Society of Labor Economists Conference, May 3–4, 1996.

8

 Analysts may be tempted to classify independent contractors who were

identified as wage and salary workers in the main questionnaire as those

workers who otherwise would have been employees of the company where

they are working or as individuals who were “converted” to independent

contractors to avoid legal requirements. However, the question wording in

the main CPS does not permit this distinction. It was not possible with the CPS

supplement to collect information on the legal aspects of employment

arrangements.

9 The February 1995 CPS used a multistage stratified cluster design to

obtain a sample of 56,000 households that are interviewed monthly. The

NLSY began in 1979 with a sample designed to be representative of individuals aged 14 to 21 as of January 1, 1979, plus an oversample of blacks and

Hispanics. By and large, NLSY respondents have been interviewed once a

year since 1979. Given the sample designs of both the CPS and the NLSY, it is

necessary to use sample weights to obtain estimates that are representative

of the entire U.S. population or a specific age cohort.

10 Lewis Segal and Daniel Sullivan, “The temporary labor force,” Economic Perspectives, March/April 1995, pp. 2–19; Lonnie Golden and Eileen

Appelbaum, “What Was Driving the 1982–88 Boom in Temporary Employment,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology, October 1992, pp.

473–93; and Karylee Laird and Nicolas Williams, “Employment Growth in

the Temporary Help Supply Industry,” Journal of Labor Research, Fall, 1996,

pp. 663–81.

11 Temporary help workers in the CPS were identified solely through the

questions in the supplement, rather than relying on individuals’ industry classifications in the basic CPS. The empirical results for the response to the main

CPS question phrasing “employed by” verify the results observed during cognitive testing of the CPS supplement. Using the word “paid” will overestimate the number of temporary help workers who are obtaining assignments

through the temporary help firm, because at least some of those who said

that they are paid by a temporary help service will be part of the “permanent” staff of the agency. However, industry estimates of overhead indicate

that the number of “permanent” workers of temporary help services is actually quite low. 12 This estimate of temporary help service workers is below the establishment survey estimate of 2.0 million jobs in the temporary supply industry

for several reasons. First, the supplement refers only to individuals’ main

jobs, while the establishment estimate refers to all jobs within the industry

regardless of whether they were individuals’ main jobs. Thus, the CPS estimate does not include temporary help workers whose main job was in another industry. Also, those working for two (or more) agencies are counted

only once in the CPS estimate. The supplement did gather information on

whether temporary help workers were registered with more than one agency

in the preceding week. Approximately 22 percent of those who said that they

were paid by a temporary help agency in the February supplement were

registered with more than one agency. In the establishment estimate, these

individuals would be counted twice if they received pay from two temporary help firms. Anecdotal evidence also suggests that many temporary help

firms are structured to provide both temporary help service workers and

contract company workers. Combining temporary help agency workers with

contract company workers and adjusting for individuals being registered

with more than one temporary help firm yields an estimate of 2.1 million

workers, which accords well with the establishment estimate of 2.0 million

jobs.

13 While the NLSY data were collected over a period of time, the question

asking whether individuals were working as a regular employee, temp worker,

consultant, contractor, or an employee of a contractor referred to the jobs

individuals held the week they were interviewed. The seasonal pattern of

employment for temporary help workers aged 29 to 37 years old is unknown.

However, generally, for all workers, temporary help employment is lowest

in the first quarter and steadily increases from first to fourth quarter.

14 See Mack A. Moore, “The Temporary Help Service Industry: Historical Development, Operation, and Scope,” Industrial and Labor Relations

Review, 1965 pp. 554–69.

15 For example see Katharine G. Abraham, “Restructuring the Employment Relationship: The Growth of Market-Mediated Work Arrangements,”

in Katharine G. Abraham and Robert McKersie eds., New Developments in

the Labor Market: Toward a New Institutional Paradigm (MIT Press, 1990),

pp. 85–119; and Paul Osterman, “Internal Labor Markets: A New Exploration,” in Clark Kerr and Paul Staudohar eds., Labor Economics and Industrial Relations: Market and Institutions (Harvard University Press, 1994),

pp. 303–49.