Resource Library

The Contingent Worker Supplement (CWS) to the Current Population Survey (CPS), fielded six times between 1995 and 2017, was designed to measure jobs that were temporary in nature as well as work arrangements thought to be associated with less commitment between workers and employers. The latter includes independent contractor and platform work, temporary help and other intermediated contract work arrangements, and on-call work, which captures a certain type of unpredictable work schedule.

The Contingent Worker Supplement (CWS) to the Current Population Survey— administered six times between 1995 and 2017—is uniquely valuable in providing detailed information on a consistent set of work arrangements in a large, nationally representative survey. Drawing on data from all six CWS waves, researchers provide an in-depth picture of the nature of contingent and alternative work and whether and how employment arrangements are changing in the United States.

Paper that presents a study of consumer learning in the context of payroll accounts, a simple financial technology that is currently being rolled out to millions of workers worldwide in response to demands for increased supply chain transparency and as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. The researchers conducted a field experiment with a population of salaried factory workers in Bangladesh who, prior to the study, received their wages entirely in cash.

Paper that presents results of a randomized controlled trial with 3,136 salaried factory workers in Bangladesh employed at two large garment factories which, at the beginning of the study, paid all wages in cash. The researchers randomly and individually assign workers within the same factory to either continue receiving their wages in cash or receive electronic wage payments through either a bank or mobile account.

The report analyzes the impact of President Obama’s 2014 executive order forbidding federal contractors to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI). Researchers use data from charges of SOGI discrimination filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission or a state nondiscrimination agency from 2013-2016. The charge data for private sector employers are matched to the EEOC’s EEO-1 of establishments to create a pooled cross section dataset of establishments with and without charges.

The researchers who produced this paper evaluate health outcomes for workers subject to incentivized compensation in an effort to better understand the effects and implications of modern day performance and piece rate pay in the growing gig economy sector. This paper is the first to explore the effects of pay type on worker health outcomes in a large and representative longitudinal and cross-sector panel of the U.S. workforce.

The report presents the results of an empirical study of ten years of employee misclassification summary judgment decisions by U.S. district courts, in which judges were asked to determine whether a worker was an employee or an independent contractor. Using text mining, machine learning classifiers, and regression analysis, the research reveals among 747 opinions that the judge ruled that the plaintiff was an independent contractor in thirty-eight percent of cases, and that the plaintiffs’ occupation was a strong predictor of outcomes.

To evaluate the impacts of Seattle’s Secure Scheduling legislation on the work schedule experiences of Seattle workers, the researchers who developed this paper surveyed a set of workers paid by the hour and employed at businesses covered by the Secure Scheduling Ordinance. The researchers collected pre-implementation, baseline survey data from Seattle workers in the Spring of 2017. The researchers then collected follow-up survey data from Seattle workers between Fall of 2017 and Spring of 2018, after the law had gone into effect.

The brief uses data from the 2018 Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) Employee Survey to summarize findings on employee eligibility rates, reasons for ineligibility, differences in eligibility by employee characteristics, and knowledge of their own eligibility.

The brief uses data from the 2018 Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) Employee Survey to summarize findings on employee leave-taking rates and characteristics of leaves taken. The survey asked about family and medical leave, both for qualifying FMLA reasons and for care of non-immediate family members with serious health conditions (which does not typically qualify). Other medical reasons that are not serious health conditions, such as a sick day for a cold, are not included.