Continuity and change in attitudes to job security across two generations of young Australian adults

ABSTRACT

Responses to the rise of insecure work are complicated by claims that emerging generations place less importance on security of employment, preferring ‘flexibility’. This paper investigates attitudes towards job security among young adults in Australia using survey and semi-structured interview data from the Life Patterns Study, a mixed-methods longitudinal study of two cohorts of Australian young adults (finishing school 15 years apart, in 1991 and 2006). Analysis shows that, contrary to the stereotype, job security was rated as the most important factor in deciding on a job by both cohorts. Moreover, although they also said they value flexibility, the school leaving cohort of 2006 put greater importance on job security as a factor in deciding on a job, both early in and at the end of their 20s. However, the qualitative interview data suggest that caution is needed in interpreting continuity and change in the importance of job security relative to flexibility, as there was evidence of a generational shift in the way the 2006 cohort were conceptualising employment security.

KEYWORDS:

• Employment conditions [security flexibility]
• generations [Generation X Generation Y (the Millennials)]
• youth
• social change
• mixed-methods longitudinal research

Acknowledgments

The Life Patterns study is undertaken by a team of scholars at the University of Melbourne, led by Professor Johanna Wyn. The author is a co-Chief Investigator on the current stage of the research with Professor Wyn and Professor Helen Cahill. Two team members, Dr Jenny Chesters and Dr Eric Fu assisted with preparation of the quantitative data for analysis and created Figure 1. Other current team members are Professor Carmen Leccardi, Dr Hernán Cuervo, Dr Mark Mallman and Dr Andres Molina. The Life Patterns study has been funded by several research grants from the Australian Rsearch Council (ARC) and other sources, most recently the ARC Discovery – DP160101611. This particular analysis was supported by a personal ARC fellowship for the author.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Myer is like Sears or Macy’s in the USA and Marks and Spencer in the UK.

2. The year range for Generation X categorisation is approximately the mid-1960s through to the end of the 1970s (there is some variation in the typologies). As noted earlier, Generation Y (also commonly known as the Millennials) where born around 1980 through to anywhere from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s.

3. The interviews with the 2006 cohort have been led by the author, who also conducted many of them, with support from other team members. The records of the interviews with the 1991 cohort are incomplete. The interviewer is no longer connected with the project; some of the interviews may have taken place in 1998 and some in 2000 and the interviews were also only partially transcribed (with further details recorded as interviewer notes). As such, the quality and extent of the excerpts and the demographic data available is less than for the 2006 cohort interviews but detailed enough to make a comparison. Relatedly, some of the excerpts from interviews with the 1991 cohort used here have appeared in an earlier Life Patterns working paper – Dwyer and colleagues (1999). Further details on the project are available here https://education.unimelb.edu.au/yrc/research/life-patterns.

4. The names used for the interview participants are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [DE160100333].

Notes on contributors

Dan Woodman

Dan Woodman is TR Ashworth Associate Professor of Sociology at University of Melbourne. He is President of The Australian Sociological Association and Vice President for Oceania in the Research Committee on the Sociology of Youth within the International Sociological Association. Dan’s primary research area is the sociology of young adulthood and generations. He is co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Youth Studies.