Exploring Multiple Employment: Gender, Local Constraints, and the World of Work

Published: Posted on

Dr Darja Reuschke has received a research fellowship by the ADR UK (Administrative Data Research UK) to use new administrative data in the ADR UK’s ‘world of work’ theme.

The ADR UK is part of the ESRC with a mission to foster the use of administrative data for the public good. The project will run over 18 months and involve collaboration with the Women’s Budget Group and Professor Tracey Warren from the University of Nottingham.

The aim of the project is to increase understanding and raise awareness of multiple employment whereby individuals have more than one job or forms of employment. Little is known in particular about the phenomenon of mixing employee jobs with self-employment mainly due to lack of data. The project will provide evidence from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) linked with His Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC) Self-Assessment and PAYE data on whether multiple employments are due to financial and/or local constraints in the labour market, and how constraints vary by gender. A gender focus is important for understanding multiple employment as existing survey data have shown that particularly women have more than one job.

The Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings is the most comprehensive survey of payrolled jobs in Great Britain carried out in April each year by the UK Office for National Statistics. ASHE is used to inform policy around the National Minimum Wage. The data are supplied by employers and contain detailed information about the job, earnings, job location, and the employees’ gender, age and location of residence. All jobs of the same employee that are registered with the HMRC as payrolled income from employment are captured in ASHE allowing to identify whether an employee has two or more payroll jobs. The novelty of this research is to use the new linkage of the employee records in ASHE with HMRC annual tax return data and HMRC payslips records. Linkage with self-assessment data provides information on individual’s annual income from self-employment and hence shows whether employees are also sole traders or partners in a business. The link with payslip data (PAYE) adds to the annual ASHE a precise monthly or weekly lens on having more than one payroll job. In addition, regional/local data will be linked in the project to individual’s residential location in ASHE (e.g. regional unemployment rate) to investigate influences of the local labour market on people’s decision to take up multiple employment.

The same employees are included in the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings every year. A longitudinal dataset can therefore be generated for this project from ASHE which enables advanced statistical analysis as the same employee can be followed over time. Statistical analysis of transitions into employees starting self-employment (and starting multiple paid employments as comparison) will be performed to establish whether low hourly/weekly earnings, low working hours, casual/temporal contracts and/or demand in local labour markets are driving the alternative work arrangements and whether influencing factors differ by gender.

ASHE is available from 1997-2022. The linkage with HMRC Self-assessment data is currently available for the tax years 2011-2018 and for 2014-2019 for the PAYE data. The data can be accessed via the Office for National Statistics’ Secure Research Service (SRS).

For more information, please, get in touch with Darja directly: d.reuschke@bham.ac.uk.

Information about the project can be found on the ADR UK website

More information about the data can be found in the ONS SRS metadata catalogue.

 


This blog was written by Dr Darja Reuschke, Associate Professor at City-REDI, University of Birmingham.

Disclaimer:
The views expressed in this analysis post are those of the authors and not necessarily those of City-REDI / WMREDI or the University of Birmingham.

Sign up for our mailing list

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *