What Great Resignation? Workers Are Staying Put
The past couple of years have been a famously tumultuous time for the US labor market — with the steepest employment losses ever early in the pandemic, a rapid recovery and then a so-called Great Resignation that was more about switching jobs than resigning.
Through all of that, the median number of years that American wage and salary workers have been with the same employer didn't budge. It was 4.1 years in January 2020, and according to job-tenure data released by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics to little fanfare last month, it was 4.1 years in January 2022.
As is apparent from the chart, the amount of time Americans spend in the same job hasn't changed all that much over the decades either. There are some comparability issues, with current statistics measuring tenure among wage and salary workers while those before 1983 (which I've harvested here from a 2019 Employee Benefit Research Institute paper) cover all workers, including the self-employed. But BLS reports from the 1960s indicate that the self-employed, especially the farmers among them, stayed in the same job longer than wage and salary workers did, so if anything, the pre-1983 tenure estimates are overstated compared with today's, and median tenure has risen slightly since then.
Given how frequently one hears that we live in an age of job hopping and unstable employment far removed from the “old model of work where you could expect to hold a steady job with good benefits for an entire career,” this is perhaps a surprising result. The tenure statistics don't quite show that such claims are entirely wrong, though.
For one thing, higher job tenure doesn't always equate to more job stability or security. In a recession when many people are laid off and there are
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