In his latest Washington Post column Robert Samuelson muses about the factors that make up the present insecurity about jobs. On the one hand job tenure is actually increasing. On the other there’s a lot of insecurity about it. How can those two things be reconciled:
The numbers are dramatic. In the 1980s, an estimated 39.5 percent of men 50 to 59 had been in their current jobs for 20 years or more. For men 60 to 64, the percentage — 40 percent — was virtually identical. By the mid-2010s, those percentages had dropped sharply to 26 percent for men 50 to 59 and to 32.3 percent for men 60 to 64.
Meanwhile, women’s average job tenure was increasing. For those 50 to 59, the share who had 20 or more years in the same job rose from 15.2 percent in the 1980s to 21.3 percent in the mid-2010s. Among workers 60 to 64, the share increased from 23.1 percent to 27.9 percent in the mid-2010s.
It’s possible for the labor market to exhibit both rising and falling job security, according to the study, which was recently released as a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research. It was written by Federal Reserve economists Raven Molloy, Christopher Smith and Abigail K. Wozniak.
or, said another way, agism is a genuine factor in men’s work and job prospects.
Its a rare event when someone points out an issue I hadn’t considered at reasonable length. But……. Mr Samuelson is spot on. Having relatively recently graduated into the workforce with an age starting with 6, it is an issue. And if its an issue for someone with my net worth, its an issue for many. Said another way, its psychological, not just numerical.
I was very happy working all those years you cite as a child-free male contract engineer and programmer, always eschewing full-time employee jobs with benefits, which even then I recognized as mostly benefits for hypochrondriacs and expectant mothers. I much preferred the doubled hourly pay and the 6- to 12-month vacations with an unemployment compensation of some $500/month contingent on my actively seeking work, which I always was, even while on some world beach. I imagine that Uber and Lyft drivers feel and live the same way today.