SR · 03
Labour-force secondary-job modules: bins, recall windows and undercount risk
Many labour-force surveys ask whether respondents held more than one job in a reference week or month, then route them into industry, hours and earnings bins. Secondary-job modules are designed for aggregate labour accounting, not for reconstructing every platform spell.
Recall and timing
Short engagements that fall outside the reference window, or that respondents classify as informal favors rather than “jobs,” tend to vanish from published secondary-job rates even when money changed hands.
Bins and aggregation
Hours and earnings categories compress variation. Multi-platform work may be collapsed into a single secondary job code, hiding churn across apps within the same window.
Undercount without drama
Method papers describe undercount as a known property of household instruments under certain definitions—not as a personal failure of respondents. Slide Rule cites those limits; it does not infer any reader’s employment pattern.