Self-Employed Contractors and Job Satisfaction
质疑自雇者比雇员更满意工作的普遍结论，利用澳大利亚1994年调查数据，区分独立承包商和依赖型承包商，发现不同自雇亚群体工作满意度差异显著。
Many studies have found that the are more satisfied with their jobs than are wage and salary earners (for example, Duffy and Stevenson 1984; Hornaday and Vesper 1982; Katz 1993; Naughton 1987a, 1987b). However, all of this research has implicitly assumed that the are a homogeneous group. In reality, this is not the case the types of workers covered by the label include professional consultants, small family business owners, farmers, tradespersons, labor-only artists, and workers trying to make a living in self-employment who would otherwise be unemployed. We therefore might expect job satisfaction to vary markedly among different sub-groups of the self-employed. This article provides a partial test of this hypothesis. In particular, data from a survey of a representative sample of the Australian workforce are used to test for significant differences in reported job satisfaction between wage and salary earners, and other workers. The focus on can be justified on at least two grounds. First, it is widely believed that the prevalence of in the labor force in industrialized countries has increased markedly during the last decade or so (McGregor and Sproull 1991; Pfeffer and Baron 1988). While hard data with which to establish this proposition are not available, it is clear that in virtually all OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries, employers are moving away from the traditional pattern of full-time, permanent, waged work and instead, in their search for increased flexibility, are offering individuals a wide variety of working arrangements. Although most obvious here are permanent part-time work and temporary employment, contract employment is generally thought to have risen also in response to the same sorts of demands (Belous 1989; BAchtemann and Quack 1989; Davis-Blake and Uzzi 1993; McGregor and Sproull 1991). Second, it is often claimed that many contract work arrangements involve a relationship between contractor and the hiring organization which differs little from the typical employer-employee relationship. That is, similar to an employee, the contractor is heavily on the hiring organization for his or her income or livelihood and, moreover, has relatively little autonomy or control over working conditions. Thus independence one of the major advantages of self-employment is missing. At the same time, these continue to bear all the risks associated with self-employment, such as poor job security and the absence of benefits typically available to employees. Self-employed such as these have variously been referred to in the literature as the fake self-employed (Kuhl 1990), bogus contractors (Dombois and Osterland 1987) and surrogate employees (Burgess 1991). We have chosen to label them as dependent contractors, thus emphasizing both the tendency for such workers to be counted among and their dependence on the service recipient for on-going work and income. It is expected that such workers would be unlikely to be more satisfied with their jobs than employees working in otherwise comparable jobs. Indeed, we might expect far greater dissatisfaction. The approach adopted in the article is as follows. After introducing the data and methods of analyses, results from bivariate analyses are presented. Then results of a regression model of job satisfaction are detailed. The model includes controls for employment status (that is, other workers, and employees) alongside controls for other personal and industry characteristics. The analysis is then repeated after separately distinguishing independent contractors from dependent contractors. The importance of the results is discussed in the conclusions. Data and Methods Data The data used in this article were collected by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) as part of its May 1994 Population Survey Monitor (PSM). …