Over the last three decades, concern has been growing about decreases in employment stability and weakening of bonds between employers and workers. Less employment stability may mean more interruptions in health insurance coverage, decreasing or stagnating wages, and a greater chance of being employed in a nonstandard work arrangement (contingent, temporary, and involuntary part-time work). Scholars seeking to understand these trends have largely explained them in terms of individual traits, such as education and job experience. Considerably less is known about how organizational characteristics, organizational formation and dissolution, and aspects of the local labor market contribute to these processes. We will examine differences in organizational traits, such as the approaches to hiring and on-the-job training used by local business owners versus national chain stores, that may yield differences in average employee tenure. We will also consider the impact of organizational dynamics in the retail sector of local labor market, such as organizational birth, expansion, contraction, and death on job mobility. To date, few researchers have calculated these rates for U.S. local labor markets and no study has linked these dynamics to job mobility.
Our research relies on newly available employment history data from the Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics (LEHD) program. LEHD provides quarterly employer and worker/job information for all private sector, nonagricultural employees from 1990-2004. We will employ a statistical method known as event history modeling to analyze the data. The work should enhance understanding of the work histories of economically vulnerable retail workers who are at risk of transitioning into public assistance. Further, the study results should also be helpful to local leaders and policymakers who need to understand the causes and consequences of economic and social turbulence in their communities.
