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 has been hard to find evidence for this is objective measures of job security but perhaps subjective measures show different trends. However, this paper shows that in the US, UK and Germany, there is no trend towards increased subjective measures of job security. This conclusion seems robust to controlling for the changing mix of the labour force and true for specific sub-sets of workers.

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Alan Manning and Graham Mazeine

18 August 2020     Paper Number CEPDP1712

Download PDF - Subjective job insecurity and the rise of the precariat: evidence from the UK, Germany and the United States

This CEP discussion paper is published under the centre's Labour markets programme.