No Decline in Long-Term Employment

From the National Bureau of Economic Research: No Decline in Long-Term Employment (HT: Greg Mankiw)

For some years it has been that reported that employees in the United States experienced widespread, substantial declines in job security or stability over the past several decades. Various newspaper articles have suggested that big structural changes in labor markets mean that job security is a "myth," that lifetime employment with a single employer is far less likely than it was, say, thirty years ago. Workers themselves worry that their prospects for keeping a job for a long period have shrunk, that they may need several jobs during their careers. "There is, however, a striking lack of solid empirical evidence to support these claims," writes economist Ann Huff Stevens.

In The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same: Trends in Long-Term Employment in the United States, 1969-2002 (NBER Working Paper No. 11878), Stevens sees stability in the prevalence of long-term employment for men in the United States, contrary to popular views. "Long-term relationships with a single employer are an important feature of the U.S. labor market in 2002, much as they were in 1969," she writes. So, the likelihood is that most workers will have some job during their working lives that lasts for more than 20 years.

Stevens uses data from surveys of men aged 58-62 who were quizzed at the end of their working careers. She finds that in 1969 the average tenure for men in the job they held for the longest period during their careers was 21.9 years. In 2002, the comparable figure was 21.4 years, not much different. Just more than half of men ending their careers in 1969 had been with a single employer for at least 20 years; the same was true in 2002. Around a quarter of those men retiring, anytime in the 1969-2002 period, had stayed with a single employer for 30 or more years.