Who Cares about Job Security?

Abstract

This paper draws on responses to two job security questions in the World Values Surveys administered in Australia and New Zealand in the 1990s and 2000s in order to identify the degree to which people prioritise and otherwise attach importance to job security. While most people regard job security as an important aspect of any job only about a quarter prioritise ‘a safe job’ above other attributes. In order to identify who cares about job security the two indicators of subjective job security are modelled as a function of people’s education, income, age, and employment status. Not surprisingly, those who care most about job security are those with limited formal education, low incomes, poorer health and older age. However, the degree to which security concerns differ between the most and least vulnerable is relatively small. This reflects the fact that almost all workers are subject to both temporal and spatial variations in labour demand as well as the fact that non-economic factors such as a person’s level of risk aversion can also influence how any given objective measure of job security is appraised subjectively.

JEL Classification: J28, J41, D81