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Alternative Work Arrangements and Job Satisfaction

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Abstract

The pressures of traditional jobs on working families, along with an aging population facing financial need, have contributed to heightened interest in the percentage of workers participating in alternative work arrangements. These include working as an independent contractor or self-employed, and those employed by others on-call, through temp agency, or as contractors. Examining job satisfaction across work arrangements by occupation and gender is one way to investigate a potential increase in the supply of such workers. Higher job satisfaction may indicate that more workers will select into these work arrangements and away from traditional jobs in the future. If this is particularly true for women, it has important implications for firms that would like to retain more women. Moreover, changes in how individuals earn a living may impact the social safety nets of such workers and their families given the nature of how such benefits are provided in the U.S. economy. This study utilizes recent waves of the General Social Survey to explore job satisfaction for workers in disaggregated alternative work arrangements, while controlling for both occupation and gender. The study finds that female workers who are independent contractors and self-employed are more satisfied with their jobs than those in regular salaried jobs, even those in nonprofessional occupations. Job satisfaction for those who work in temp agencies, do on-call work or work for contractors is no different than for those in regular jobs, regardless of occupation and gender.

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Notes

  1. Firms often lose female workers moving up the career ladder when family responsibilities increase.

  2. When studying self-employment, Budig (2006) noted that such jobs had increased in the most and the least rewarded occupations, thus lumping all self-employed workers together in one category missed a lot of heterogeneity.

  3. The GSS is administered to a sample of U.S. residents every other year by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. Its purpose is to collect demographic characteristics and attitudes. Job satisfaction (dependent variable) and work-type questions were only asked in the selected survey years.

  4. Self-employed others were individuals who stated that they had a regular job but were self-employed.

  5. Since the data span three years, two different occupational classifications were used, the 1980 codes and the 2010 codes. For the 1980 codes, we selected the ones labeled “Managerial and Professional”, which included codes 5–199. For the 2010 codes, we also selected the ones labeled, “Managerial, Professional, and related occupations”, which were codes 10–3540.

  6. Sampling weights provided by GSS (Smith et al. 2015) were used in this estimation process. Beginning in 2004, the GSS began to use a two-stage sub-sampling design for nonresponse. Following their recommendation, we used the General Social Surver weight with a non-response adjustment weight for all analysis. See also Solon et al. (2015) for a discussion of using weights.

  7. Alvarez and Sinde-Cantorna (2014) found that the positive effect of self-employment on job satisfaction was due to the greater work autonomy afforded by self-employment and not to the greater willingness of the self-employed to report higher levels of job satisfaction. Bradley and Roberts (2004), who provided controls for personality characteristics, found that such characteristics only diminished the impact of self-employment on job satisfaction. Lange (2012), who controlled for both flexibility and psychological characteristics, concluded that the greater job satisfaction among the self-employed was due to the greater flexibility and autonomy of those jobs.

  8. Some job satisfaction studies addressed the issue of selectivity by first modeling the individual’s probability of working and then using that equation to calculate an inverse Mill’s ratio. The inverse Mill’s ratio is then used in the job satisfaction equation. To do the same here would require estimating a multinomial logit equation for work type and then using those results to calculate an inverse Mill’s ratio to include in the ordered probit equation. We believe that the assumptions required would have questioned the validity of the estimates.

  9. Houseman (2001) pointed to the 1995/1997 Current Population Survey data that showed that over half of on-call workers and two-thirds of temp agency workers would have preferred regular work.

  10. With the inclusion of the interaction terms, there was no separate coefficient for in control or no control.

  11. Wilkin (2013) provided a summary of various studies which examined job satisfaction between contingent workers and permanent workers. Wilkin found that contingent workers were not a homogeneous group.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Kathryn Asher for her assistance in organizing the data and participants at the International Atlantic Economic Conference in Boston, 8-11 October 2015, and Eastern Economic Association conference for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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Correspondence to Cheryl Carleton.

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Carleton, C., Kelly, M. Alternative Work Arrangements and Job Satisfaction. Atl Econ J 47, 293–309 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11293-019-09628-3

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