Tracking 30 Years of Working Conditions and Their Cumulative Toll at Age 60

• In Event: Employment Instability, Working-Time Employment Policies, and Economic, Health, and Work-Family Wellbeing

Abstract

We start with the assumption that having a healthy life with a decent standard of living is a universal goal, and that work is the critical mechanism for achieving this goal through the resources it provides (income, social protection measures). The global transformation of the labor market in recent decades has made employment increasingly volatile and precarious, with more workers subject to working conditions that threaten their economic security. We thus re-examine the meaning of work with the U.S. nationally representative longitudinal data of respondents aged 14 to 22 in 1979 (NLSY79, n ≈ 5,000) whose working lives have gone through the period when precarious jobs were on the rise. We applied a life-course lens to examine employment conditions characteristic of precarious work over a 30-year period from ages 25 to 54, analyzed the likelihood of transitioning between employment conditions over time, and linked employment conditions and economic and health outcomes at age 60.

Longitudinal latent class analysis across three age periods, 25–34, 35–44, and 45–54, identified six to seven profiles of employment conditions, ranging from best to worst (or least to most precarious). Importantly, we found evidence of “sticky floors and ceilings”: individuals tended to remain in either the best or worst profile over time. Multivariate regression results suggested that those with more precarious employment conditions were significantly more likely to have poorer economic and health outcomes at age 60. These findings highlight the lasting consequences of precarious employment, showing how such jobs can transform work into a vulnerability that undermines the ability to achieve a healthy life with a decent standard of living. The sticky nature of employment conditions, together with the implications for intergenerational economic and health inequalities, underscores the critical roles of policies and practices in mitigating the precarious nature of employment conditions, which hold significant promise for reducing disparities within and across generations.

Author

• Wen-Jui Han, New York University
  Presenting Author