1983 Ad

Monthly Labor Review, Oct, 1984 by Ellen Sehgal

Intergenerational and intragenerational upward occupational mobility is an accepted part of American life. Also commonly accepted is a picture of the U.S. labor market in which workers are highly mobile in general. Numerous books and articles describe Americans' extensive "job hopping" and geographic mobility. American workers are seen as changing occupations and employers in far higher proportions than their counterparts in other industrial nations.

This view of widespread job mobility is supported by a number of developments which tend to hold down the measures of average tenure in the United States, particularly in comparison with Japan and other industrial nations. These developments primarily are related to rapid increases in the U.S. population and labor force. For example, over the past decade, millions of American women have entered the labor force each year. Moreover, the American work force has been boosted by high rates of migration (both legal and illegal) into the United States. As a result, employment has grown by 20 million since the early 1970's. And with all of these new workers in the labor force, it is not too surprising that the overall measure of job tenure for the United States is relatively low.

Yet, a detailed look at the data on tenure shows that a large proportion of American workers apparently spend most of their "mature" worklife with the same employer and in the same type of work. Jobs held by middle-aged workers appear highly stable. New data from the Current Population Survey seem to support the contention that mature American workers, on average, show substantial job stability, thus making them not too unlike the workers of Japan.

Of course, there is significant job movement among young workers, both in terms of employers and types of work. Still, once they settle into a career path, employees become considerably more stable in terms of their work than is generally thought. This is the picture which emerges from the most recent information on workers' tenure with their employer and in their current occupation. The information was gathered through special questions in the Current Population Survey on the work persons were doing in January 1983, whether it was the kind of work they did a year earlier, how long they had done that kind of work, and how long they had been working continuously for their current employer.

Among the principal findings:

* One worker in 6 has been with his or her employer for at least 15 years.

* Among workers aged 45 and over, nearly one-third have been with their current employer is closely linked to occupational stability.

* The rate at which women change occupations has increased substantially over the past two decades, but for men there has been no trend. Tenure with employer

As expected, the length of tenure with one's employer is strongly related to the age of workers. For example, the vast majority of teenagers working in January 1983 had held their jobs for 1 year or less. Workers aged 20 to 24 also had short tenure. Again this is not surprising, because most of these young adults are recent entrants into the labor force, their jobs being largely temporary in nature while they are in the process of searching for and establishing careers. In contrast, many older workers have become attached to a particular employer and a given occupation, and thus are far less mobile. Their longer attachment to a job usually provides wage increases and greater employment security as well as pension rights.

Among workers aged 35 to 44 in January 1983, more than one-third had been with the same employer for 10 years or more, and among workers 45 and over, nearly one-third had been at their jobs for at least 20 years. (See Table 1.) This indicates a substantial employment stability among a large portion of American workers. While tenure among younger workers is obviously shorter, the observed pattern by age, if continued into the future, would indicate that about half of all workers aged 30 to 34 who have been with an employer for 10 to 14 years are likely to remain with that employer for a least another 10 years. And for workers aged 25 to 29 the proportion would be almost 40 percent.

On average, men have longer job tenure than women. This is primarily because uninterrupted labor force participation has been common for men but is a more recent practice for women. As shown in table 1, among all workers 16 years of age and over, the proportion that had been with their employer 15 years or more was about 20 percent for men and 10 percent for women. Job tenure was longer for men than for women in part-time as well as full-time employment. Black women (who have had a high rate of labor force participation for many years) exceeded both white and Hispanic women in tenure with their 1983 employer.

Young men and women have similar median years of job tenure. Tenure for men, however, becomes significantly longer than for women at ages 35 and older. As the following tabulation shows, in the 55-to-64 age group in January 1983, median tenure for men was 16.9 years, in contrast to 10.3 years for women.