Do parents’ socioeconomic characteristics shore up employment security?

• In Event: 4255 - Section on Economic Sociology Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 12. Status Characteristics and Wages

Abstract

Research in the sociology of labor markets has documented an extensive shift in the conditions of employment that has coincided with the post-industrial transformation of the U.S. economy. While this empirical work has focused on various indicators of employment relations that signal the onset of growing precarious employment, little work to date examines the extent to which measures of precarious employment and measures of employment insecurity are conditioned by differences in social origin. Examining how social origin characteristics interact with precarious employment is important given well known effects of social origin for labor market attainment. We evaluate the effect of father’s education and occupational status on subjective measures of employment security, and we examine the extent to which the effect of social origin covariates on occupational attainment of adult children is mediated in part by standard permanent employment. We find limited support for the claim that social origins shape directly perceptions of employment security. However, having a father with at least a bachelor’s degree increases the odds of reporting that it is is somewhat easy to find a comparable job. We find strong evidence that the effect of parent’s education and occupational status is channeled through the attainment of a permanent standard employment relation. Permanent employment induces substantively important improvement in occupational status, even after controlling for economic sector differences.

Authors

• Harold J. Toro, University of Notre Dame

• Matthew R. McKeever, Haverford College