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Risks of a Modern Economy

Kristin J. Cummings, MD, MPH; Kathleen Kreiss, MD

JAMA. 2008;299(4):448-450.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Employment arrangements in which the worker has a nontraditional relationship with the work-site employer have come to be grouped together in recent years as "contingent" work. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as employers sought more flexibility, contingent employment arrangements became more common in the United States. From 1969 to 1993, the number of part-time workers nearly doubled, representing a quarter of all growth in the national workforce.¹ From 1982 to 1990, employment in temporary agencies increased 10 times faster than did the workforce as a whole.² During the 1980s, the use of independent contractors in coal mining and of contract company workers in agriculture doubled.³

The use of contingent workers has not been limited to the private sector: by 2006, the federal government was spending an estimated $400 billion per year on contractors.⁴ Since national data were first collected by the Department . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Author Affiliations: Division of Respiratory Disease Studies, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Morgantown, West Virginia.