Labor force change in Germany since 1882: A life cycle perspective

Only as far as the two oldest cohorts are concerned can we speak of a majority still working in agrarian jobs. Beginning with the men born in the middle of the last century, the main occupation shifts to mining and industry. This continued to be true for all cohorts during following 100 years. The development of the youngest cohorts seems to show that at the end of the occupational life, their members will be more strongly represented in the service sector than in the manufacturing branches. Using the cohort approach, this transition from an agrarian society to an industrial one and the further development of a society organized around the offer of services, could have been handled through the demographic turnover of the potential labor force rather than through occupational shifts by individuals. For the present, the empirical analyses can be summarized as follows. A general pattern of occupational structural change at the cohort level covering all branches of the economy does not exist for Germany. In the agricultural area, which showed a permanent and strong decrease of the work force, the entry placements of younger people stayed relatively high until the 1950s and went along with an increasing exit mobility during the employment life. Surprisingly, in the expanding secondary sector, one can find an age structure similar to that existing in the agricultural sector. The rapid growth of service sector occupations was not accomplished by an enlarged recruitment of younger people, but rather by the entry of cohort members at a later time in their occupational life. Relative to the sectoral extension, the entrance of younger people into the tertiary sector was distinctly lower. Extending over all sectors, the cohort succession shows a development of the entry placements and job mobility, which can, ex post, be characterized as an increasingly faulty allocation of young persons. Within the societal development, the younger labor force—especially during the time of stagnation until 1950—represented, more and more, an older sectoral occupational structure rather than a modern one. This fact, and the consequence of an increasingly higher mobility during the working life, led to episodes of general social reallocation which exceeded by several times the minimum of individual moves required to handle the structural change of the occupational system. As to the membership of worker and white-collar positions during life, remarkable (not yet explained theoretically)