Insecurity and Long-Term Employment

Abstract

There is a widespread view that `jobs for life' and stable employment have been consigned to the past. The impact of technological and institutional changes are said to have eradicated traditional labour market patterns, brought about the destandardisation and individualisation of work and ushered in a new `age of insecurity'. The transformation of work, according to Sennet (1998), has witnessed the advent of a `New Capitalism' in which there is `no long term'. This paper is concerned with explanations for the paradox of pervasive insecurity and the rise in long-term employment in the 1990s in the UK. The analysis of long-term employment in the UK suggests that insecurity is not explained by compositional changes in the workforce or in terms of labour market restructuring. Instead insecurity is best understood in its institutional and ideological contexts, as the `manufactured uncertainty' that attends the greater exposure of the state sector to market forces, corporate restructuring in the private sector in terms of mergers, acquisitions and sell-offs and the diminution of social protection systems.