Job Tenures and the Gig Economy

Summary

A few weeks ago, Alex Usher drew my attention to this post by the Pew Research Center, on job tenure patterns of 18-35 year-olds in the United States. The takeaway point was that, contrary to an oft-repeated narrative about the “new gig economy”, job tenure patterns among millennials resemble those of the generation previous.

Of course, Canada is not the United States: what do job tenure data look like for younger cohorts up here? It turns out that this may be one of those rare cases where Canadian data are richer than American data: the Labour Force Survey has been asking about job tenure since 1976, and we can focus on more tightly-defined age groups.

I’ve calculated three job-tenure measures:

• Median job tenure
• Proportion with job tenure of one year or less
• Proportion with job tenure of five years or more