Recent trends in job stability and job security in Australia

Abstract

This paper reviews evidence on recent trends in job stability and job security, and in workers’ perceptions of job security, in Australia. Rates of job stability and job security are found to have been relatively stable between the 1980s and mid-1990s. Over the long run some slight increase in job stability has occurred due to a greater proportion of female workers in long tenure jobs (10+ years). Job security – measured as the inverse of the rate of worker retrenchment – declined significantly in the early 1990s, but most of this effect appears to have dissipated by the mid-1990s. Workers’ perceptions of the probability of job loss seem to correspond quite closely to time-series movements in actual retrenchment data. Significant change has, however, occurred between the 1980s and mid-1990s in workers’ feelings about more broadly defined perceptions of job security, relating for example, to beliefs about predicability of what a job will entail in the future (for example, tasks to be performed or hours of work). In this dimension of workers’ perceptions of job security there has been a significant decline evident in the mid-1990s. It is speculated that the source of that decline may be developments in the Australian labour market from the late 1980s onwards that have shifted bargaining power in the employment relationship towards employers.