The Statement of Task was revised on 6/25/2019:
The Committee on National Statistics of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will appoint an expert panel to review the Contingent Worker Supplement (CWS) of the Current Population Survey (CPS) for the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in the U.S. Department of Labor. The CWS provides key measures of temporary (contingent) work, alternative work arrangements, and the “gig” economy. Disagreements, however, exist among researchers, policy makers, and other stakeholders about the definitions and measures of these concepts and priorities for future data collection.
The expert panel’s work and consensus recommendations will be guided by the current research and policy questions that need to be answered. Many of these questions arise from concerns about the economic and health impacts of modern work arrangements on the population, which are rapidly evolving in response to emerging technologies, the changing sectoral composition of the economy, and the shifting boundaries of where, how, and by whom work is performed.
The expert panel will carefully review measures of employment, earnings, and worker wellbeing in temporary and alternative work arrangements that can be estimated using household survey data, such as those generated by the CWS, as well as measures that can be produced using administrative, commercial, and combined data sources. The comparative advantages and complementarities of different data sources will be assessed. In addition, the expert panel will review methodological issues underpinning BLS’s measurement objectives. As part of its information-gathering activities, the panel will conduct a workshop to hear the perspectives of data users, stakeholders, and both survey and non-survey data experts.
The panel will produce a consensus report, which will include rapporteur-authored proceedings of the workshop along with conclusions and recommendations for BLS to guide continued improvement of the CWS.