When I spoke to Jimmy he was panicking. The agency had given him no work that day. If the same thing happened tomorrow he would struggle to pay his bills.

One of the first things you wonder when you hear a story like this, particularly if you are a journalist, is whether it tells you something bigger about the world of work. Is this sort of arrangement rare or common? Is it dying out or taking off?

These are surprisingly tough questions to answer.

Most countries produce reliable statistics on the number of people who are employed and unemployed but they find it harder to measure what they call non-standard or contingent work — arrangements such as Jimmy’s where the employment relationship is fractured, impermanent or unclear. These labels also apply to people working in the “gig economy” and the “human cloud” of online taskers.

Many believe this sort of work is on the rise, but the numbers we have are patchy and ambiguous. Policymakers are flailing around in the dark. When the US Department of Labor hosted a symposium in December on the future of work, the common refrain was the need for better data. To that end, US statisticians are going to try to count the number of contingent workers by adding questions to their regular nationwide survey of the labour force.

That is a good start, but better data on the quantity of these jobs will not necessarily tell us about their quality.

I discovered this when the UK’s official statisticians tried to count the number of people, like Jimmy, who had “zero-hours” contracts, which do not guarantee a minimum amount of work. They published two estimates: 744,000 people (based on a worker survey) or 1.5m contracts (based on an employer survey).

We learnt from the worker survey that a fifth of people on zero-hours contracts were full-time students and two-fifths wished they had more hours.

The employer survey told us that big companies used the contracts more than small ones. These facts were interesting but they danced tantalisingly round the edges of the question everyone really wanted answered, which was how many of those people were insecure and unhappy, and how many were perfectly satisfied with the arrangement.

In the absence of decent information, the debate polarised down predictable lines. Left-wingers said zero-hours contracts were exploitative. Right-wingers said they gave workers the flexibility they wanted. Journalists like me quoted a few people from each side and called it a day.

I remember an email exchange with my editor on the topic. “Curious to know where [the] truth lies,” he wrote.

I don’t think it’s possible to know, I replied. “But Sarah,” he shot back,
“our calling is to be seekers after truth . . .!!” He had a point. Of course there is no objective “truth” about something so subjective, but the quality of work in the 21st century is a critical policy issue. It is a cop-out for me to write “some people say x, other people say y” and sign off with a shrug.

We journalists will have to take our notebooks out of the office to dig up better evidence about how, where and why work is changing.

Statisticians could try harder too. I chewed this over last week with Ed Humpherson, head of enforcement at the UK Statistics Authority, the official watchdog. He came up with an interesting idea. Britain’s statisticians could map their surveys of people’s “wellbeing” against their labour market data to shed some light on the satisfaction and anxiety levels of people in different types of employment. It would be rough and ready but at least it would be a start.

We need more information like this to know when we should worry about the new world of work and when we should celebrate and facilitate it.

The debate will otherwise remain static and superficial, and that will not serve anyone well, least of all the people it is meant to be about.