United States Department of Labor
Are you a ride-share driver using a mobile app (like Uber or Lyft) to find customers? Maybe you do household chores or yardwork for others by finding short-term jobs through a website (such as TaskRabbit or Handy) that arranges the payment for your work. Or perhaps you perform online tasks, like taking surveys or adding descriptive keywords to photos or documents through a platform (like Amazon Mechanical Turk or Clickworker). If so, you are an electronically mediated worker. That’s a term BLS uses to identify people who do short jobs or tasks they find through websites or mobile apps that connect them with customers and arrange payment for the tasks. Have you ever wondered how many people do this kind of work?
BLS decided to find out. In the May 2017 Contingent Worker Supplement to the Current Population Survey, we asked people four new questions designed to measure electronically mediated employment.
Measuring electronically mediated work is difficult
After studying respondents’ answers to the new questions and other information we collected about them, we realized the new questions didn’t work as intended. Most people who responded “yes” to the questions clearly had not found their work through a website or app. For example, a vice president of a major bank, a local police officer, and a surgeon at a large hospital all said they had done electronically mediated work on their main job. Many people seemed to think we were asking whether they used a computer or mobile app on their job. That could apply to many jobs that aren’t electronically mediated.
But it wasn’t all for naught. After extensive evaluation, we concluded we could use the other information in the survey about respondents’ jobs to identify and recode erroneous answers. That allowed us to produce meaningful estimates of electronically mediated employment.
So, who does electronically mediated work?
Based on our recoded data, we found that 1.6 million people did electronically mediated work in May 2017. These workers accounted for 1.0 percent of total employment. Compared with workers overall, electronically mediated workers were more likely to be ages 25 to 54 and less likely to be age 55 or older. Electronically mediated workers also were slightly more likely to be Black, and slightly less likely to be White, than workers in general. In addition, electronically mediated workers were more likely than workers overall to work part time (28 percent versus 18 percent).
Workers in the transportation and utilities industry were the most likely to have done electronically mediated work, with 5 percent of workers in this industry having done such work. Self-employed workers were more likely than wage and salary workers to do electronically mediated work (4 percent versus 1 percent).
What’s next?
We currently don’t have plans to collect information on electronically mediated work again. And even if we did, we wouldn’t want to use the same four questions. At the least, we would need to substantially revise the questions so they are easier for people to understand and answer correctly.
Taking a broader look, we are working with the Committee on National Statistics to learn more about what we should measure if we field the survey again. The committee is a federally supported independent organization whose mission is to improve the statistical methods and information on which public policies are based.
How can I get more information?
The data are available on our website, along with an article that details how we developed the questions, evaluated the responses, recoded erroneous answers, and analyzed the final estimates.
If you have a specific question, you might find it in our Frequently Asked Questions. Or you can contact our staff.