A group of nonprofit advocacy organizations and academics are pushing the Department of Labor to release nonprofit employment data more regularly, arguing the information is critical to understanding one of the largest sectors of the U.S. economy.
Currently the department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics releases overall employment data on a monthly basis for American industries but does not break out nonprofit figures. The bureau releases nonprofit employment and wage data every five years.
Nonprofit employment data was last released in 2019. At that time, researchers found that nonprofits employed more workers than the entire manufacturing sector — more than 10 percent of all workers. But the next data release won’t occur until 2024.
That leaves a big gap for academics and others who track the nonprofit portion of the U.S. economy, said Lester Salamon, director of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Civil Society Studies. Salamon’s team has been providing estimates of nonprofit employment figures since June 2020 as part of an effort to gauge the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on charities. But their work is based on the assumption that nonprofits employ a similar share of workers as they did in 2017.
But more urgently, Salamon said, the lack of a more frequent schedule for the release of nonprofit employment data affects how regulators and legislators conceive of the nonprofit sector.
There’s a perception that “this is a trivial sector, that it’s not a big economic presence” Salamon said. “When the government passes a law or a Payroll Protection Program and acknowledges that small businesses should be eligible entities, nobody thinks about the nonprofit sector.”
Now the Aspen Institute is leading an effort to gather prominent nonprofit leaders and organizations to sign a letter to the Department of Labor demanding more regular updates on nonprofit employment data. Signatories so far include 150 groups and individuals, including the Independent Sector and the National Council of Nonprofits.
Organizers plan to file the letter as a public comment on the Department of Labor’s strategic-planning efforts for 2022 through 2026. Once finalized, the document will govern how the department and its subsidiary bureaus operate. That will include data release schedules for employment and wage information. The public comment period closes Friday, and the Aspen Institute hopes to gather as many signatures for its letter as it can by Thursday.
“We hope in the Department of Labor’s efforts to produce gold-standard statistics, they will see that keeping regular data on the nonprofit sector is part and parcel of that,” said Cinthia Schuman, deputy director of the program on philanthropy and social innovation at the Aspen Institute. “How can you have gold-standard statistics on the state of the nation’s work force when you’re not including regular information on the third-largest private industry?”
