Subjective job insecurity and the rise of the precariat: evidence from the UK, Germany and the United States
Alan Manning and Graham Mazeine
There is a widespread belief that work is less secure than in the past, that an increasing share of workers are part of the "precariat". It is hard to find much evidence for this in objective measures of job security, but perhaps subjective measures show different trends. This paper shows that in the US, UK, and Germany workers feel as secure as they ever have in the last thirty years. This is partly because job insecurity is very cyclical and (pre-COVID) unemployment rates very low, but there is also no clear underlying trend towards increased subjective measures of job insecurity. This conclusion seems robust to controlling for the changing mix of the labor force, and is true for specific sub-sets of workers.
14 May 2024
Review of Economics and Statistics 106(3) , pp.748-761, 2024
https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article/doi/10.1162/rest_a_01196/111185/Subjective-Job-Insecurity-and-the-Rise-of-the
This Journal article is published under the centre's Community Wellbeing programme, Labour programme.