Is a job for life or just for Christmas?

It is a much vaunted notion that the job for life was once the norm, and is now the exception. It's so widely accepted that I don't think anyone knows where the idea came from or what data it's based on - it's so obviously true that it doesn't need to be backed up with evidence.

I have struggled to really get my head round this as the statistics don't seem to agree with the prevailing view, but also don't really agree with each other. One challenge is that statistics are often fairly blunt instruments. Gregg and Wadsworth (2002) illustrate this nicely. Looking at the data from 1975 to 2000 they highlight that the two following statements are both currently (at least were in 2002) true:

The typical worker today can expect to spend ten years in their current job
and
The typical job will last 15 months.

This is explained by the fact that 'job survival chances rise sharply with duration' which means that half of all jobs last around a year but that the other half are likely to last 5 or 10 years: if you make it through the first year, your chances of staying long term are high.

So that's quite interesting, but has this always been the case, or is this something new? Well, this depends on who you read. Most literature falls down on the side of no change (or little change) but there are some dissenting voices. In the UK, the Labour Force survey suggests no change, but the General Household Survey suggests a bit of a change. There are a number of confounding issues. The data is hard to trace as the question seems to have been asked in different ways at different times, so it's hard to know whether you're comparing like with like; economic cycles have a huge impact, so you have to be sure you're comparing the right times within two economic cycles; and finally, maternity rights came in in 1979 and were extended in 1994, changing women's access to continuous service.

Overall, there is some evidence that men's average tenure and women without dependent children's has gone down a bit, but mothers with dependent children's has increased. The decline in men's long term jobs seems to be concentrated in men over 50. For men, median job tenure has declined by about 20% since 1975.

Gregg, P. and Wadsworth, J. (2002) Job tenure in Britain, 1975 - 2000. Is a job for life or just for Christmas Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics 64 (2) 0305 - 9049