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
