Lifetime Jobs and Transient Jobs: Job Tenure in Britain 1975-91

We examine 17 years of a large cross-section to build up a picture of job tenure in Britain. We show that men (women) can expect to hold their present job for about 18 (12) years. These summarize bimodal distributions, with one mode at short tenures, and one at very long tenures. We find some change in the mean job tenure: a decrease in elapsed tenure of about 10% between 1982 and 1991. These are important changes, but they do not support the view that the dramatic changes in the labour market, technology and competition have spelt the end of `jobs for life'.