ECSN Research Seminar - Time After Time: The Stickiness of Temporary Jobs in Career Pathways

ABSTRACT

Research on temporary employment has provided ambiguous evidence on how it affects workers' career mobility. We use a dynamic temporal lens to examine young workers’ careers over a ten year period when they work in temporary, time-limited contracts compared to standard, open-ended contracts. We propose a self-reinforcing mechanism associated with temporary contracts stemming from a discounting of the work experience of temporary workers. This mechanism sets temporary workers on a path wherein,  they are likely to be stuck in a sequence of temporary jobs rather than switching to standard jobs.  However, not all temporary jobs lead to dead-ends. Jobs that are time-limited, but are intended to develop human capital such as apprenticeships should not have these negative effects. They are likely to be less “sticky” than other temporary jobs.  Opportunities to gain skills in each job, especially verifiable ones, alter the path-dependent trajectory of temporary jobs that we predicted. We examine these ideas using data from a ten-year national longitudinal survey of 10,904 French labor market entrants, and an experiment to explore the discounting of temporary work contracts. The data provide support for most of our arguments. We also found that time spent in both types of temporary employment were associated with lower salary and career satisfaction after ten years.