Doug Henwood wrote,
>Continuing a discussion from several months ago, the opening of a BLS news
>release published today. The full text is on the BLS web site at
>http://stats.bls.gov/news.release/conemp.toc.htm.
This is good news. It gives the lie to hype about "job shift" and the
"entrepreneurial new economy". Contingency is *not* a new reality, but is
itself contingent on high unemployment. As unemployment comes down,
employers see employees as less expendable and absorb contingent workers
into permanent positions. Obviously, the turnover in contingent jobs and the
workers in those jobs has to be much larger than the marginal changes in
numbers of jobs, especially under the definition of contingency where the
job is expected to last less than a year.
The self-employment numbers are in marked contrast to the situation in
Canada where, with persistant high unemployment there has been an explosion
in se, much of it involuntary self-employment (ten percent of the
self-employed in 1996 gave "couldn't find a job" as the reason for being
"self-employment"). I suspect that the same contrast would hold for the more
broadly defined contingent employment.
Regards,
Tom Walker
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