Home-based workers: Data from the 1990 Census of Population

Monthly Labor Review

Volumn 119, Issue 11, 1996, Pages 26-34

  Edwards, Linda N ^a   Field Hendrey, Elizabeth ^b  

^a CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK   (United States)

^b CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0141802100     PISSN: 00981818     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (27)

1. Link Resources Corporation, news release, "1993 Home Office Trend Fact Sheet." The data come from proprietary surveys taken by the company and are made available to the public only in the form of news releases. According to these releases, Link Resources' National Work-at-Home Survey is based on telephone surveys of 2,500 randomly selected U.S. households. The company defines a homeworker as a person aged 18 or older who performs "income-producing or job-related work at home part- or full - time and/or uses one or more of the following for work at home: PC, modem, fax, multiple phone lines." Link Resources' estimate of the proportion of homeworkers, thus defined, for 1991 was 31.2 percent, which is substantially higher than the proportion for 1991 reported in the Current Population Survey (CPS) special survey taken that year and published in 1994.
2. William G. Deming, "Work at home: data from the CPS," Monthly Labor Review, February 1994, pp. 14-20.
3. Ibid.
4. The data for 1960 and 1980 come from Hillary Silver, "The Demand for Homework: Evidence from the U.S. Census," in Eileen Boris and Cynthia R. Daniels (eds.), Homework: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Paid Labor at Home (Urbana, IL, University of Illinois Press, 1989). The data for 1990 are from 1990 Census of Population: Social and Economic Characteristics: United States (U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1993), table 18, p. 18.
5. The data for 1960 and 1980 come from Hillary Silver, "The Demand for Homework: Evidence from the U.S. Census," in Eileen Boris and Cynthia R. Daniels (eds.), Homework: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Paid Labor at Home (Urbana, IL, University of Illinois Press, 1989). The data for 1990 are from 1990 Census of Population: Social and Economic Characteristics: United States (U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1993), table 18, p. 18.
6. "Working at Home to Clear the Air," The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 19, 1992, p. B1.
7. The seven banned industries were women's apparel, jewelry manufacturing, knitted outerwear, gloves and mittens, button and buckle manufacturing, handkerchief manufacturing, and embroideries. The only exceptions were for workers who were disabled or too old to get to a place of business and workers who had to care for the disabled. In these exceptional cases, special certificates had to be obtained from the Department of Labor under Regulation 29 CFR, Part 530.
8. Federal Register, vol. 53, no. 213 (Nov. 10, 1988), pp. 45706-45727 (reprint, incorporating subsequent corrections printed in Federal Register, Nov. 17, 1988).
9. Federal Register, vol. 53, no. 213 (Nov. 10, 1988), pp. 45706-45727 (reprint, incorporating subsequent corrections printed in Federal Register, Nov. 17, 1988).
10. The ban on homework in one industry, knitted outerwear, had already been lifted effective Dec. 5, 1984. The revised Regulation 29 CFR, Parts 516 and 530, appears in the Federal Register (Nov. 10, 1988). Also included in that issue is a detailed review of all of the proposed rule changes, beginning with that of May 11, 1981, and a précis of all of the comments received at the various hearings conducted up until the promulgation of the 1989 rule.
11. "Spread of Illegal Home Sewing is Fueled by Immigrants," The Wall Street Journal, Mar. 15, 1994, p. B1.
12. See the letter submitted for the record by Jackie Ruft, executive director of District 925 of the Service Employees International Union, in U.S. House of Representatives, Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations, Hearing, "Pros and Cons of Home-Based Clerical Work," Feb. 26, 1986.
13. "Union Resistance Could Slow the Growth of Telecommuting," The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 22, 1992, p. A1.
14. Judith Gerson and Robert E. Kraut, "Clerical Work at Home or in the Office: The Difference it Makes," in Kathleen Christensen, ed., The New Era of Home-Based Work (Boulder, co, Westview Press, 1988).
15. Ibid., p. 50.
16. The results of this survey are in Deming, "Work at home."
17. There was also a special supplement to the CPS in May 1985 on the issue of work at home, but the relevant questions were worded differently from those in the 1991 survey, so the data are not comparable. (See Deming, "Work at home.")
18. Personal service industries include private households, hotels and motels, other lodging places, laundry and cleaning establishments, beauty shops, barber shops, funeral services, shoe repair shops, dressmaking shops, and miscellaneous services. (See Census of Population and Housing, 1990: Public Use Microdata Sample Technical Documentation (U. S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1992).)
19. The category of "managerial and professional specialty" occupations includes as a major subcategory "professional specialty" occupations, which include occupations such as engineer, architect, surveyor, mathematical and computer scientist, health diagnosing professional, assessing and treating professional, social worker, writer, and lawyer.
20. These questions could also be investigated with the CPS data used by Deming.
21. Census of Population and Housing, 1990.
22. Persons who used more than one mode of transportation were requested to identify the one used for most of the distance traveled to work. The question pertains to the location at which the person worked most in the previous week. It is not possible to determine whether persons worked at more than one job.
23. Because home-based workers constitute between 2 percent and 3 percent of total employment, this differential sampling rate yields samples of home-based and onsite workers of the same order of magnitude. Note that in computing the means reported in the tables, we use the weights provided by the Census Bureau.
24. Interestingly, the proportion of workers with someone aged 65 or older in the household was only slightly larger for home-based workers than for onsite workers (5.5 percent versus 5.2 percent), suggesting that if having an elderly person in the household creates a need for home-based work, this effect is offset by the possibility that the elderly may facilitate onsite work by acting as baby-sitters.
25. Information about the number of children ever born is obtained from question 20 in the Census of Population. This question is asked only of women. (See Census of Population and Housing, 1990.)
26. For workers in rural farm areas, 88.9 percent of the home-based men and 61.4 percent of the home-based women were in farm occupations, whereas the corresponding percentages for onsite workers were 33.0 percent and 6.6 percent, respectively. For those who worked 45 or more hours per week, 37.1 percent of the home-based men and 8.4 percent of the home-based women were in farming occupations, compared with 2.3 percent of the home-based men and 0.7 percent of the home-based women for onsite workers.
27. While some of these home-based rural workers are farmers, farming does not by any means account for all rural home-based workers: slightly more than 48 percent of all male home-based workers live in rural areas, but only 25.5 percent of male home-based workers report farmer as their occupation. For female home-based workers, 32.0 percent live in rural areas, but only 5.6 percent are in farming occupations.