Young workers and the job-swapping phenomenon

Abstract

This paper suggests that the job-swapping phenomenon associated with new entrants to the workforce marks part of a social adjustment process in the transition to adult working life in which young people, by virtue of their age and inexperience and the jobs in which they work, embark on a series of separations. The data-set under investigation consists of a survey of a single cohort of 1922 early school-leavers from manual backgrounds in London, 1979-1981. Job-swapping as an adjustment process was identified for a minority; non-whites were more separation-prone than whites, but there were no gender differences. The effect of the process on change in income over the period of the survey was ev..