Employment trends in the US non-profit sector

Abstract

Until pioneering research on non-profit employment was performed under the auspices of the Filer Commission in the mid-1970s and shortly thereafter at Yale, there had been little public recognition of the non-profit sector's use of human resources. Victor Fuchs and others had earlier brought to public attention the rapid growth of the service economy in the United States, but it was the Filer and Yale work that revealed the importance of the non-profit segment of the service economy by demonstrating that the growth of the non-profit labour force during the 1970s had substantially outstripped the growth of the for-profit labour force in the service economy. I begin with this historical finding to emphasise the importance of the size and trend data on non-profit employment in the Almanac. As has been often confirmed, employment and its trend is by inference a barometer of change in production and economic development. Because of the heterogeneity of the economy's products and services, it is difficult to measure real output in physical terms. Therefore, economists and statisticians have resorted to production indexes to summarise real output, and to employment data to track economic development. No doubt it is the importance of employment data in the Almanac which accounts for the extensive and excellent discussion of employment data sources and methodology (see Hodgkinson and Weitzman in this volume). I will not repeat that information but simply refer you to it. This provides me with the opportunity to focus on pointing out a serious gap in the employment data and to comment on related editorial policy that the Almanac might have followed in this respect, as well as generally throughout the publication. In the Almanac, concentration has been placed on size and trend of non-profit labour force by industry. Data on wages and salaries and other compensation are also presented by industry. A major effort is made to estimate volunteer hours, annual full-time equivalent employees, and dollar values for volunteer hours a Herculean task. But the Almanac, however, provides rather limited data on non-profit labour force