Trends in Job Instability: Measurement, Recessions, and a Cross-National Comparison
In the late 1990s, RSF funded research on job instability that culminated in On the Job: Is Long-Term Employment a Thing of the Past? (2000), edited by David Neumark. The book concluded that it was “premature to infer long-term trends toward declines in long-term employment relationships, and even more so to infer anything like the disappearance of long-term, secure jobs.” Recent research, however, has documented decreasing job stability. Given these new developments and the impact that job instability has on workers’ lives, this topic is of renewed interest.
Sociologist Matissa Hollister will examine the extent to which job tenure duration and separation/retention rates provide similar or diverging conclusions regarding job instability trends. She will analyze the Canadian Labour Force Survey (LFS) to delve into the details of job instability measures and then apply these lessons to U.S. data.