Abstract
Despite significant interest in the changing nature of employment as a critical social and economic challenge facing society—especially the decline in the so-called Standard Employment Relationship (SER) and rise in more insecure, precarious forms of employment—scholars have struggled to operationalize the multifaceted and heterogeneous nature of contemporary worker-employer relationships within empirical analyses. Here we investigate the character and distribution of employment relationships in the U.S., drawing on a representative sample of wage-earners and self-employed from the General Social Survey (2002–2018). We use the multidimensional construct of employment quality, which includes both contractual (e.g., wages, contract type) and relational (e.g., employee representation and participation) aspects of employment. We further employ a typological measurement approach, using latent class analysis, to explicitly examine how the multiple aspects of employment cluster together in modern labor markets. We present eight distinct employment types in the U.S., including one resembling the historical conception of the SER model (24% of the total workforce), and others representing various constellations of favorable and adverse employment features. These employment types are unevenly distributed across society, in terms of who works these jobs and where they are found in the labor market. Importantly, women, those with lower education, and younger workers are more likely to be in precarious forms of employment. More generally, our typology reveals limitations associated with binary conceptions of standard vs. non-standard employment, or insider–outsider dichotomies envisioned within dual labor market theories.
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Data Availability
The data analyzed in this study are available from NORC at the University of Chicago, https://gss.norc.org/Get-The-Data.
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The authors would like to acknowledge funding support from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (award number F31MD013357) and the National Institute on Aging (award number R01AG060011) of the National Institutes of Health.
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection, and analysis were performed by TP. The first draft of the manuscript was written by TP, and all authors commented on and edited previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Peckham, T., Flaherty, B., Hajat, A. et al. What Does Non-standard Employment Look Like in the United States? An Empirical Typology of Employment Quality. Soc Indic Res 163, 555–583 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-022-02907-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-022-02907-8