Work at home: new findings from the Current Population Survey - home labor

Monthly Labor Review, Nov, 1986 by Francis W. Horvath

Formalized arrangements rare

In standard classifications, the Bureau of Labor Statistics divides employed workers into three class-of-worker categories --wage and salary, self-employed, and unpaid family workers. For purposes of comparability with the Bureau's establishment data, those workers who are the nominal employees of corporations which they own--the "self-employed incorporated'--are treated as wage and salary workers. In our analysis, however, these workers are displayed separately, leaving an "all other wage and salary workers' category that consists entirely of persons employed by someone else.

Table 5 displays a breakdown of home-based workers according to this classification. It suggests that formalized business arrangements are rare for the typical home-based worker. Fewer than 7 percent of those working full time at home in nonagricultural jobs were incorporated. For agriculture and nonagriculture combined, about 2 of every 3 home-based workers who worked 35 hours or more were operating as unincorporated self-employed businesspersons.

Children and home-based work

Home-based work offers a chance for some persons with children to more effectively combine the roles of parent and worker. Elimination of commuting and child-care expenses can be a strong incentive for households with young children to experiment with home-based work. About 600,000 married mothers of children under 6 years of age reported some home-based work. (See table 6.) More than one-fifth of such women worked at home for 35 or more hours as part of their contribution to the job market.

In general, there were slight differences between women and men working in homes with young children. However, among nonfarm workers with 35 hours or more of home-based work, there were three times as many women with very young children as there were men.

Working exclusively at home

Using responses from the regular portion of the Current Population Survey as well as those from the May supplement, it is possible to compare the hours worked at home with all work hours during the previous week and thus identify persons working "entirely' at home. The classification showed 2.2 million persons working exclusively at home in May 1985. (See table 7.) About 390,000 of those working exclusively at home were in farming occupations, leaving almost 1.9 million persons as the home-based work force. About two-thirds of these were women.

As might be expected, the hours of persons working solely at home were far higher than the overall averages for home-based work. Where work was conducted exclusively within (or from) one's home, men averaged 41.1 hours, while women totaled 27.7 hours. About half of the persons whose work was entirely home based were in service industries, such as professional services, business and repair services, and personal services. Only about 100,000 of the persons with home-based work in professional specialty occupations, which includes computer programming as a subset, worked entirely at home.