LIFERS.(The Talk of the Town)(job insecurity)

In the summer of 2004, at the Republican National Convention, President Bush declared that the rules of the American job market had changed for good. "The workers of our parents' generation typically had one job, one skill, one career, often with one company," he said. "Today, workers change jobs, even careers, many times during their lives." Job instability has become a consistent source of anxiety for American workers: one recent poll found that forty-six per cent of respondents worried that a member of their household would be out of work in the near future. And that anxiety--magnified by major layoffs in the past year at companies like Hewlett-Packard and General Motors--has a lot to do with why, despite brisk economic growth and low rates of unemployment and inflation, most Americans remain pessimistic about the economy.

Yet the surprising reality is that long-term employment hasn't disappeared at all. It's certainly easier than it once was (and more common) for people to move from job to job, but when you look at the economy as a whole, little has changed. For instance, a recent study by Ann Huff Stevens, a labor economist at the University of California at Davis, compares the careers of older men in 1969 to those of older men in 2002, looking at how many years members of each group spent working at the job they held the longest. In 1969, the average was 21.9 years; in 2002, it was 21.4 years. In 1969, slightly more than half of the men had held one job for at least twenty years, and the proportion was almost identical in 2002. In the same vein, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has found that median job tenure among all workers over the age of twenty-five has fallen only slightly since the early eighties. And a 1999 study of fifty-one major corporations found that the percentage of employees with more than ten years of service increased in the nineties.

What, then, is fuelling the overwhelming sense of job insecurity? In part, it's that a few high-profile examples tend to sway opinion more than broader statistics do. (Psychologists call this the "salience bias.") The downsizing at big companies like A.T. & T. in the early nineties was taken as proof of an economy-wide transformation, even though those job losses, in the context of the total U.S. economy, were small. Furthermore, our view of the golden age of lifetime employment is skewed: the average American worker in 1978 had held ten different jobs before retiring. This doesn't mean that long-term jobs are as easy to come by as they once were--less-educated workers, in particular, have more trouble finding and keeping jobs today. But the changes in job tenure are more media myth than workplace reality.

American workers do, though, have plenty of other reasons for feeling anxious. Although the way companies hire and fire has not changed ...