Home-Based White Collar Employment: Lessons from the 1980 Census

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Abstract
Recent debate about home-based employment has been uninformed by current, representative data. By mining 1980 Census data, we partially solve this problem. Only 1.6 percent of the work force worked at home as their primary place of employment in 1980, a percentage that had been declining since 1960. A decision to work at home seems based in part on an equilibrium between needs for employment flexibility and needs for earned income and, as a result, people who work at home come from social groups who would have the most trouble being employed outside the home, because of social or physical constraints: mothers, the elderly, the disabled, and people living in rural areas. Homeworkers earn substantially less than conventional workers. Perhaps because they earn less, those who work at home most are those who depend least on their own earned income: nonblack married women and people with household income over and above their awn earnings.

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