MEASURING CONTINGENT EMPLOYMENT IN IRELAND. ESRI RESEARCH SERIES NUMBER 74 AUGUST 2018

McGuinness, Seamus and Bergin, Adele and Keane, Claire and Delaney, Judith (2018) MEASURING CONTINGENT EMPLOYMENT IN IRELAND. ESRI RESEARCH SERIES NUMBER 74 AUGUST 2018. UNSPECIFIED.

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Abstract

The term ‘contingent employment’ generally refers to an employment relationship that is non-permanent. There is a belief that recent years have seen a substantial emergence of contingent employment as a facet of modern labour markets, but there is little work that has documented or measured the incidence of contingent employment in Ireland. This report addresses this deficit by measuring the incidence of contingent employment in Ireland, assessing the extent to which this is changing over time and profiling the individuals most likely to be contingent workers. The report uses three datasets for the analysis: the Quarterly National Household Survey (QNHS), the EU Survey of Income and Living Conditions (EU SILC) and CEDEFOP’s European Skills and Jobs Survey (ESJS). The two principal components of contingent employment in Ireland are employees on temporary contracts and freelancers. The incidence of contingent employment ranged from 8 to 9 per cent of total employment between 1998 and 2005, before increasing to over 10 per cent between 2011 and 2013. It had fallen back towards its pre-recession level by 2016. Therefore, the evidence does not support the view that the incidence of contingent employment has been increasing steadily over time in Ireland. Freelance employment has been increasing steadily in Ireland since 1998; however, freelancers are a relatively minor component of the Irish labour market, accounting for just over 2 per cent of total employment (employment + selfemployment) and 12 per cent of self-employment in 2016. Temporary employees account for 80 per cent of contingent workers. Temporary employment has not shown an increasing trend over recent years. It increased somewhat during the post-recession period of 2011 to 2013 to just over 8 per cent of total employment; however, the rate had returned to its long-run average of 7 per cent of total employment in 2016.

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