Contingent Employment

Contingent employment has received great attention in both public and academic debates during the last decade. The concept of contingent employment stems from the U.S. term contingent work. The U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS) has conducted the most comprehensive studies of contingent employment. The result of the BLS researchers' efforts to find more “effective measures” of contingent employment was what could be called a bottom-up definition of contingent workers: individuals who do not perceive themselves as having an explicit or implicit contract for continuing employment. Based on this definition, a special survey of contingent and alternative arrangements was conducted as a supplement to the 1995 Current Population Survey (CPS), a survey of households that is a primary source of information on the American workforce. Since then, similar studies have been made every second year. These efforts have certainly raised the awareness and the level of discussion regarding contingent employment in the U.S. context. In Europe, similar efforts are nonexistent. Instead, most studies of [Page 266]contingent employment use national Labor Force Survey (LFS) data, allowing measurement and analysis of the distribution of various forms of temporary work.

Contingent employment is here used as a unifying concept for all types of employment relationships that may be terminated with minimal costs from the point of view of the employer. This includes all types of contractual relationships that both parties may regard as limited in time, i.e., employees working on limited duration contracts (LDCs), working through temporary work agencies (TWAs), or those who are self-employed. Compared to the BLS definition of contingent work, this definition is broader and more relevant when comparing developments in the European labor markets. Thus, the term contingent employment is here used to signify what in the U.S. context is generally referred to as alternative work arrangements.