Fewer Workers Choose to Move to New Pastures

[Ego]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/25/busin ... tures.html

A new analysis .... used a combination of factors — job shifts, movement in and out of the labor force, interstate migration, job creation and destruction, among others — to measure what they called fluidity or dynamism in the labor market.

What they found was a drop of 10 to 15 percent between 1980 and 2013. Some individual measures showed starker declines: The proportion of workers who jumped from one job to another plunged by nearly a quarter.

Mobility normally drops during downturns, and that was the case during the Great Recession. Millions of jobs vanished, and those fortunate enough to be working were less inclined to give up the one they had.

Not what I would have expected.

[Lucky C]

Quitting rates have been rising significantly since 2013 though. Quits as a percentage of the workforce were very low in 2013, but are now back up to the pre-recession level.

http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dsho ... ness-Cycle

[ducknalddon]

I wonder if the shift to two earner households has influenced this, it's much harder to move if two people need to find a job rather than just one.

[jacob]

@Lucky C - Those quitting rates seem to track the hiring rate, so it's probably just people leaving one job for another, i.e. a simultaneous two-count. What is increasing since 2013 are job openings, so net demand is up.

@ducknalddon - It could also be the rise in part time jobs. If a standard consumer couple needs 3-5 part time jobs to pay their bills, it's not easy to relocate and find that many new jobs. This would be even worse than what in academic circles is known as the "two-body problem".

Another factor might be that the housing market in 2013 had finally recovered enough to begin unlocking many people from their underwater houses. Strangely this mobility should eliminate the systemic unemployment caused for underwater homes.

[Riggerjack]

I'm sure the dual income is a factor, but also, people are more passive about their careers in general. The formula for advancement used to be well known by the middle class, but the rules changed. Since your parents think their experience doesn't apply, and teachers think advancement equals tenure, and your friends have the same problem, where do you go to get a clue? The internet is the obvious answer, but a huge portion of the population thinks that is Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, with the adventurous using the first page of Google results.

As the article said, people are staying in entry level positions.

Part of this, is entry level positions were there to weed people out, but as HR Dept's are more about ensuring equality by insisting on treating employees as interchangeable, it gets harder to promote out of an entry position than to hire someone else who has experience.

Also, those entry positions pay better. This lack of mobility is a key factor in the $15/hr minimum wage. If you can't progress on your own, then progress by legislation sounds good.

I hope this is a blip, a trend that reverses. But the only way I can see that happening is for HR to lose influence in hiring/promoting quotas over productivity. That won't change without a crisis to force the change... I hope to be retired before then.