Employment Instability: A Dynamic Perspective

This article analyzes the incidence and correlates of employment instability in Poland, using individual-level retrospective career data from the 1998, 2003, and 2008 POLPAN surveys. It uses a new instability indicator, which takes into account the length of workers' consecutive employment spells: A respondent is considered to be in unstable employment if he or she had not held a single regular job lasting three years or longer within a ten-year period. The findings suggest that employment relations in Poland are generally stable, consistent with the results of earlier studies of worker mobility. A comparison of instability rates between two ten-year periods (1993-2003 and 1998-2008) did not confirm the expected growth in the incidence of employment instability. Unstable work histories were found to be more frequent among individuals with the weakest position on the labor market: the least educated, in low-level occupations, and in secondary-sector industries.