70. The Truth About Work

The gap between rhetoric and reality never seems to grow any narrower when it comes to the public discussion of employment. Politicians and journalists, recruit­ment agencies and management consultants continue to make the flesh creep with talk of the end of the permanent job for life, the arrival of flexible labour markets and the emphasis on employability in a world of regular job changes.

An impression is given of a rapid, irreversible transformation of the supposed world of stable, long-tenured employment that dominated the industrialized economies for the first three decades after the second world war. However, much of this received wisdom is wrong. A research paper from the International Labour Organization provides evidence to demonstrate this.

The research shows that the average length of job tenure hardly changed during the 1990s. In fact it rose slightly to 10,5 years. As the ILO report states: 'In contradiction to an assumed radical change in the labour markets towards less stability and more numerical flexibility, the investigation of job tenure does not, in fact, show any universal trend towards increased labour market instability among the major industrialized countries. ... While certain sub-groups of the population, such as those with less education, experienced less job security than in the past, for the most part these analyses indicate there was no systematic change in the duration of jobs over time,' concludes the ILO.

What differences exist in job tenure between countries seems to have less to do with technological change or globalization and more to do with the ups and downs of the business cycle. 'Research shows that flows both in and out of employment tend to be counter­cyclical, so average job tenure is declining in upswings and increasing in downturns,' notes the ILO. 'The decline in job tenure observed, in recent years may mainly reflect the economic recovery that has taken place in some countries, rather than a structural shift towards increased job instability.'

Shorter job tenures can be found among university graduates, while those with the longest time in a job have a medium level of educational qualifications. People working in larger companies are more likely to stay with their employer for a long time. Downsizing tends to hit junior workers most, not the ageing core.

The report found that job retention rates stayed remarkably stable, at least after the early 1980s. But the figures mask a tendency for younger and older workers to have lower retention rates compared with those of prime age.

But this is not the end of the matter. The report tries to find out why so many people believe they are living through a period of exceptional job instability. The ILO acknowledges that between 1985 and 1998 we experienced a significant net increase in the amount of temporary work (fixed-term contracts and temporary agency employment). But the existence of a temporary work contract is not necessarily a sign of instability. Fixed-term contracts are an important gateway into long-term employment.

So what explains the view that we think we are living in an uncertain world of work? It may be that an involuntary loss of work now covers the articulate, skilled white-collar elites - not just blue-collar workers - and they make a bigger fuss about being made redundant.