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4 - How Good Are U.S. Jobs? Characteristics of Job Ladders across Firms in Five Industries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

By
Clair Brown ,
Benjamin Campbell ,
Fredrik Andersson ,
Hyowook Chiang  and
Yooki Park
Edited by
Clair Brown ,
Barry J. Eichengreen  and
Michael Reich
Clair Brown
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
Barry J. Eichengreen
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
Michael Reich
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Summary

INTRODUCTION

This chapter documents and examines firms' job ladders (i.e., initial earnings, earnings growth, and tenure) in the ten-year period 1992–2001 through analysis of a national linked employer–employee dataset, informed by fieldwork in five industries (financial services, retail foods, semiconductors, software, and trucking). Specifically, we examine the insufficiently studied question: What do earnings progressions for individuals look like within firms and how do earnings progressions vary across different types of firms in the same industry? Our addition to the literature is to identify the job ladders that prospective workers face within an industry. We find that job ladders vary greatly both across and within the five industries and that patterns of job ladders by firm characteristics within and across industries reflect the institutional dynamics of the industries.

In our fieldwork in the five industries, we observed several types of human resource management (HRM) systems in firms and industries across time. Some companies provide their workers with long job ladders with high initial earnings and earnings growth that reflect the skill development of the workers, and workers tend to stay. This type of HRM is called an internal labor market (ILM) and historically was common in large, growing companies that had market power. However, competitive pressures in the past two decades have led companies to restructure their ILMs (and HRM generally) to be more market-driven and performance-based (Cappelli 1999; Osterman 1996).

Type
Chapter
Information
Labor in the Era of Globalization , pp. 153 - 190
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

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