Books

On the Job: Is Long-Term Employment a Thing of the Past?

David Neumark (editor)

Table of Contents Authors Chapter 1

In recent years, a flurry of reports on downsizing, outsourcing, and flexiblestaffing have created the impression that stable, long-term jobs are a thing ofthe past. According to conventional wisdom, workers can no longer count onbuilding a career with a single employer, and job security is a rare prize.While there is no shortage of striking anecdotes to fuel these popular beliefs,reliable evidence is harder to come by. Researchers have yet to determinewhether we are witnessing a sustained, economy-wide decline in the stabilityof American jobs, or merely a momentary rupture confined to a few industriesand a few classes of workers.

On the Job launches a concerted effort to reconcile the conflicting evidenceabout job stability and security. The book examines the labor force as awhole, not merely the ousted middle managers who have attracted the mostpublicity. It looks at the situation of women as well as men, young workersas well as old, and workers on part-time, non-standard, or temporary workschedules. The evidence suggests that long-serving managers and professionalssuffered an unaccustomed loss of job security in the 1990s, but there isless evidence of change for younger, newer recruits. The authors bring ourknowledge of the labor market up to date, connecting currentconditions in the labor market with longer-term trendsthat have evolved over the past two decades. They find thatlayoffs in the early 1990s disrupted the implicit contractbetween employers and staff, but it is too soon to declare apermanent revolution in the employment relationship.

Having identified the trends, the authors seek to explainthem and to examine their possible consequences. If thebonds between employee and employer are weakening,who stands to benefit? Frequent job-switching can be a signof success for a worker, if each job provides a steppingstone to something better, but research in this book showsthat workers gained less from changing jobs in the 1980sand 1990s than in earlier decades. The authors also evaluatethe third-party intermediaries, such as temporary help agencies, whichprofit from the new flexibility in the matching of workers and employers.

Besides opening up new angles on the evidence, the authors mark outcommon ground and pin-point those areas where gaps in our knowledgeremain and popular belief runs ahead of reliable evidence. On the Job providesan authoritative basis for spotting the trends and interpreting thefall-out as U.S. employers and employees rethink the terms of their relationship.