The dependently self-employed: A study to define and understand their work situation and income security
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study focused on a growing segment of the non-standard workforce, the dependently self-employed (DSE). Twenty-six participants (22 women and 4 men) in own-account, knowledge based, self-employment who derive the majority of their income from one primary source were interviewed about their work conditions and relationship with their primary client, their reasons for entering and remaining in dependent self-employment, and their income stability and desire for access to income protections. An analysis of participants' status as self-employed revealed that 57.6% would probably be reassessed by the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency (CCRA) as employees. The majority of participants were identified as having been pushed into self-employment (57.6%) due to job loss, recession/limited job opportunities or job demand changes/restructuring of a job. In many cases, several factors of push and pull had operated jointly to affect participants' work options. Overall, participants were very satisfied with their status as DSE, citing enhanced flexibility to balance work/family obligations, money, autonomy and the opportunity for challenging work. This particular sample reported high levels of income stability as a result of high business and household incomes, although situations of income precariousness were identified. While participants highly valued their independence as self-employed individuals, many participants also expressed a desire for access to social security benefits such as sickness benefits (53.8%) and maternity/parental leave benefits (57.7%) as administered through Employment Insurance.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".