differently from own-use goods (such as growing food crops for family use) in official labor statistics. Under the revised ICLS standards, _all_ activities to produce goods or provide services for own use are excluded from employment and captured under a new category of own-use production work. Hence, while the differential treatment of goods and services for own use still exists in production statistics (i.e. national accounts), production of either one now counts as work (but not employment) in labor statistics.

# **_A new category of work and better measurement of labor underutilization_**

To account for own-use production of goods and services, the 19<sup>th</sup> ICLS introduced a new concept of ‘work’, and created a corresponding conceptual framework, which captures all activities within the SNA general production boundary.<sup>7</sup> By this definition, farmers mainly or only cultivating for own use would be ‘working’ but not ‘employed’, just like someone taking care of his/her children. As described in ILO (2013a), a potential advantage of classifying own-use production of goods and services as work is that it will create incentives to collect better data on domestic work, which in the past had often been omitted from labor force surveys and other household surveys. Such data are of critical importance, for example, in analyzing gender differences in the intra-household allocation of labor and time scarcity as a constraint to (female) labor force participation, etc. Moreover, the new forms-of-work framework acknowledges that different forms of work may be performed simultaneously during the reference period (ILO 2013b).

In addition, the 19<sup>th</sup> ICLS also introduced new measures of labor underutilization, beyond unemployment. These include time-related underemployment (i.e. employed individuals who would want to work additional hours) and the potential labor force (i.e. individuals who are outside of the labor force but maintain a degree of attachment to the labor market).<sup>8</sup>

# **2.2 Operationalization challenges of the revised definition of employment**

The 19<sup>th</sup> ICLS resolution contains several ambitious features to capture more dimensions of work – particularly its focus on the measurement of all forms of work, including unpaid domestic work, and additional measures of labor underutilization. At the same time, however, the 19<sup>th</sup> ICLS standards bring

> 7 Since the labor force continues to be defined as the sum of persons in employment and unemployment (i.e. not in employment but available and actively searching for employment), being engaged in any form of work other than employment, does not count towards employment ratios or labor force participation rates.

> 8 More specifically, the potential labor force includes the following two subgroups (neither of which qualifies as unemployed): (i) unavailable job seekers, i.e. individuals seeking employment but currently unavailable to take up employment and (ii) available potential job seekers, i.e. individuals who would want to be employed and are available to take up employment, but who did not carry out any job search efforts during the reference period. For more details, see <u>https://www.ilo.org/global/statistics-anddatabases/statistics-overview-and-topics/WCMS_470306/lang--en/index.htm.</u>

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