Been with the same employer for 10 years or more? That doesn’t exactly make you a rarity in the US, where 30.2% of employed wage and salary workers were in that situation as of January 2024, according to data released last month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And while this percentage is down from a decade ago, it’s close to where things stood for the much of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s.
Nothing to see here, right? Contrary to oft-heard claims about the ever-more-fleeting nature of employment in the US, long-run jobs appear to be about as prevalent as ever.
Except that they aren’t, really. The placid picture painted by the above chart is the product of a so-called composition effect, in which changes in the makeup of the population being measured deliver a headline statistic that to some extent misrepresents what’s going on under the surface. In this case, the change is that the US labor force has been aging, and older workers are more likely to have been with the same employer for 10 years than younger ones. Slice up the workforce by five-year ago group, as the BLS does in the tenure statistics it releases every two years, and the percentage for every group from ages 30 to 59 turns out to have either hit a new low in 2024 or tied the low set in 2022.
The share of American workers ages 25 to 29 who have been at the same job for at least 10 years has followed a similar trajectory — from 5.1% in 1991 to 2% in 2024 — but was slightly lower in 2020 and 2022. Meanwhile, older workers have followed a different path from their younger peers, with 10-year jobholding more common now than two decades ago among both those 60 to 64 and those 65 and older. These are now also the only two age groups with more than 50% of workers in the 10-years-or-more club.
The persistence of long-term jobholding among workers 60 and older, coupled with the growth in their share of the US workforce from just more than 6% for most of the 1990s to a record 14.7% in September, goes a long way toward explaining the overall stability of the 10-years-with-the-same-employer percentage. Gender composition effects have also played a role, albeit it mostly in the 1980s and 1990s. Here, for example, are the trajectories for men and women in their early 40s.
In 1983, 51.1% of male American workers ages 40 to 44 had been with the same employer for 10 or more years; this January only 32.5% had. That’s a really big drop. It also may not surprise you. As mentioned earlier, the belief that jobs are less stable than they used to be is widely held and has been a staple of media labor market coverage for decades.
Such coverage has at times exaggerated the decline in stability. In 2016, I wrote the first in what has become a series of columns about job tenure and related statistics after seeing a newspaper article cited on Twitter that claimed average job tenure in the US had fallen from 22.5 years in 1960 to 3.6 in 1996. The BLS reports median tenure, not average, and it was 3.8 years in 1996 and 3.6 in 1998 — that part of the claim wasn’t far off. But median tenure in 1963 (there was no survey in 1960) was just 4.6 years.
Again, the seeming stability of the overall tenure number masks some big changes among specific groups, changes most starkly apparent in the age-group statistics on workers with 10 or more years at the same employer. So to some extent this is a mea culpa. My coverage of this topic has emphasized headline numbers that show little change in the instability of employment. But clearly some things have changed.
Have they changed for the worse? My 10-year-employment charts start in 1983 because that’s how far back consistent statistics are available, but numbers from a 1963 BLS report seem to indicate that the percentage of workers in that situation was lower then than two decades later. In 1963, the US economy was booming; when the tenure survey was conducted in January 1983, it was in awful shape (although about to get better) — the unemployment rate was 10.7%; real wages for production and nonsupervisory workers had fallen 15% over the previous decade. There’s clearly a cyclical element to the tenure statistics, and it’s that people switch jobs more often when the labor market is strong.
The picture is more mixed over the long run, with declining stability for individual workers arguably balanced against increased economic dynamism and flexibility. One perhaps surprising factor in recent tenure declines is that government’s share of US nonfarm employment fell below 15% in 2021 for the first time since the 1950s (it peaked at more than 19% in the mid-1970s and was 14.7% last month), and median tenure of government workers is 6.2 years compared with 3.5 in the private sector. That doesn’t seem all bad, does it?
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