ILO and OECD notes on measuring secondary and informal earnings

National household surveys sit inside a wider drafting conversation maintained by international organizations. The International Labour Organization (ILO) publishes statistical standards and guidelines on employment, informal economy concepts and, increasingly, digital platform employment. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) publishes comparative labour statistics and notes on informal employment and non-standard work. Draftwage reads those documents as drafting aids for secondary and informal earnings — norms and definitions — not as a personal playbook.

What international guidance adds

ILO statistical standards give countries a shared vocabulary for employment, working time and informal productive activities. Guidance related to digital platform employment, developed through ILO expert discussions and published guidelines, tries to place platform-mediated work inside labour statistics rather than leaving it as an undefined residual. That effort matters for secondary earnings because platform tasks are often part-time, multiple and short; without a drafted concept, national questionnaires invent incompatible lines.

OECD materials on informal employment and non-standard work similarly stress that cross-country comparisons fail when definitions diverge. Informal earnings attached to a primary formal job, or secondary informal activity beside formal employment, can be invisible if the questionnaire only drafts a single main job. International notes therefore push for modules or follow-ups that ask about additional productive activities and about informal characteristics (registration, social protection, place of work) without treating informality as a moral label.

Distance from any single national series

A documented limit of international guidelines is that they are norms ahead of, or beside, national series. Countries adopt concepts at different speeds; some field special modules, others wait for census or labour-force redesigns. Citing an ILO or OECD definition as if it were already the operative line in a given country’s monthly survey is a category error. Draftwage keeps that distance explicit: guidance drafts what should be measurable; national microdata show what was actually asked.

Another limit is operationalization. Even when a guideline defines platform employment or informal secondary activity, field translation into a short household interview remains imperfect. Translation choices — which examples interviewers read, which reference period is used — reintroduce the same coverage problems visible in CPS-style instruments. Method papers that evaluate compliance with international standards usually report partial alignment, not full capture of secondary earnings.

How Draftwage uses these sources

Sheets on this board cite ILO or OECD text when a definition or recommended module clarifies a drafting dispute (for example, whether unpaid contributing family work belongs in employment counts, or how platform work relates to status in employment). Figures are attributed to the publishing organization or to national series that claim compliance. Contested adoption timelines are marked as contested rather than smoothed into a single global rate.

What this sheet does not claim

This sheet does not claim that secondary earnings are rising or falling for any reader, does not recommend informal or platform work, and does not treat international guidelines as individualized advice. It describes how ILO and OECD measurement notes try to draft secondary and informal earnings into statistical practice, and why national instruments still lag those drafts. For crises or personal decisions, local professional and emergency services apply — not this editorial board.

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