Thomas Kruse wrote: >Employment may be steady, unemployment low, but these kind of numbers >suggest a lot of turn over. I know that when I have to hustle up work, >living on year-to-year contracts as I do, it is very stressful. Sennett's >recent book illustrates how such hustling makes life pretty miserable. > >Is turnover/instability something you economists study as part of "standard >of living"? Most studies of turnover/instability/tenure I've seen for the U.S. show no significant increase from the 1970s. I know this is counterintuitive, and it pisses people off when I say it sometimes, but it seems to be true. What may have happened is that some instability has crept up the social ladder, making middle managers vulnerable to the instability that blue/pink collar workers have long known, which attracts more attention than in the past. Also, behind the flattish average tenure figures, men are falling but women are rising. See <http://www.mijcf.org/pub03/pub03_workingpapers6.html> for a review of the literature. It's not full text, just an abstrat, but you can order the print version for free. Yes, it's from the Milken Institute, but it's a lit review, and one of the authors, Stefanie Schmidt, is a fairly liberal feminist. But the no-uptrend story shouldn't obscure the fact that capitalist labor markets show a tremendous volatility, and that even in times of strong net job growth, there's tremendous gross job loss going on too. In fact, it's changes in job creation more than job destruction, that drive the employment cycle. I wrote up a Census study of this at <http://www.panix.com/~dhenwood/Myth-smashing.html>. In one of its annual Employment Outlooks, the OECD found Europe with entry into unemployment stats very similar to the US's, though Europe was much weaker on the exit from unemployment. Extreme turbulence is capitalism's norm. Doug
