Every day, the Instawork platform handles thousands of transactions involving businesses and hourly professionals, generating a huge amount of data on hourly pay as well as other aspects of the labor market. This report summarizes some of the major trends in demographics, roles, and worker constraints in regions across the United States.
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The data are also compiled into the Instawork Pay Signal Index (PSI) and indexed trends in hourly pay. Because businesses can book shifts in advance on the Instawork platform, the metrics include forward-looking data for the current month as well. Please refer to the appendix for explanations of the methods behind each metric.
A slight majority of businesses raised pay in June, but advance bookings suggest this may reverse in July:
Our in-app surveys track Pros' labor market situations on a monthly basis. For details on methods and questionnaires, please see the Methodological Appendix below.
Here is the distribution of Pros by the jobs they worked up through the reference week (19 June 2023) this month:
Work in full-time jobs came down in June, but the share of Pros who wanted a full-time job was steady:
More Pros wanted part-time jobs, but fewer actually had them. These could be further signs of a cooling labor market.
The share of Pros working 0-10 hours increased in June, but it was offset by the share of Pros working 21-30 hours:
A slightly larger share of Pros did say they wanted to work 0-10 hours in June. But looking at the entire sample, the preference for hours increased, with the highest share of Pros preferring 31+ hours of work in the past four months:
In June we also asked our Pros how they thought the labor market would change in July. Here are their responses:
The Pros who thought finding a job would be harder in July easily outnumbered those who thought it would be easier. Meanwhile, almost a third of Pros were too uncertain about the future to respond. The fact that only a third of Pros expressed any confidence about the labor market suggests more cooling may be on the way.
The share of men working shifts on the platform fell for the fourth straight month, and the share of white workers dropped for the third straight month after a long increase. Because non-white and non-male workers have historically had a harder time finding full-time jobs in a soft labor market, these could be signs of further cooling in the economy:
