past, or of what he may be qualified to do in the future.
The high rate of job turnover now evident in the United States is also increasingly characteristic of Western European countries. In England, turnover in manufacturing industries runs an estimated 30 to 40 percent per year. In France about 20 percent of the total labor force is involved in job changes each year, and this figure, according to Monique Viot, is on the rise. In Sweden, according to Olof Gustafsson, director of the Swedish Manufacturing Association, 'we count on an average turnover of 25 to 30 percent per year in the labor force ... Probably the labor turnover in many places now reaches 35 to 40 percent.'
Whether or not the statistically measurable rate of job turnover is rising, however, makes little difference, for the measurable changes are only part of the story. The statistics take no account of changes of job within the same company or plant, or shifts from one department to another. A. K. Rice of the Tavistock Institute in London asserts that 'Transfers from one department to another would appear to have the effect of the beginning of a 'new life' within the factory.' The overall statistics on job turnover, by failing to take such changes into account, seriously underestimate the amount of shifting around that is actually taking place – each shift bringing with it the termination of old, and the initiation of new, human relationships.
Any change in job entails a certain amount of stress. The individual must strip himself of old habits, old ways of coping, and learn new ways of doing things. Even when the work task itself is similar, the environment in which it takes place is different. And just as is the case with moving to a new community, the newcomer is under pressure to form new relationships at high speed. Here, too, the process is accelerated by people who play the role of informal integrator. Here, too, the individual seeks out human relationships by joining organizations – usually informal and clique-like, rather than part of the company's table of organization. Here, too, the knowledge that no job is truly 'permanent' means that the relationships formed are conditional, modular and, by most definitions, temporary.
In our discussion of geographical mobility we found that some individuals and groups are more mobile than others. With respect to occupational mobility, too, we find that some individuals or groups make more job changes than others. In a very crude sense, it is fair to say that people who are geographically mobile are quite likely to be occupationally mobile as well. Thus we once more find high turnover rates among some of the least affluent, least skilled groups in society. Exposed to the worst shocks and buffetings of an economy that demands educated, increasingly skilled workers, the poor bounce from job to job like a pinball between bumpers. They are the last hired and the first fired.
Throughout the middle range of education and affluence, we find people who, while certainly more mobile than agricultural populations, are nonetheless, relatively stable. And then, just as before, we find inordinately high and rising rates of turnover among those groups most characteristic of the future – the scientists and engineers, the highly educated professionals and technicians, the executives and managers.
Thus a recent study reveals that job turnover rates for scientists and engineers in the research and development industry in the United States are approximately twice as high as for the rest of American industry. The reason is easy to detect. This is precisely the speartip of technological change – the point at which the obsolescence of knowledge is most rapid. At Westinghouse, for example, it is believed that the so-called 'half-life' of a graduate engineer is only ten years – meaning that fully one half of what he has learned will be outdated within a decade.
High turnover also characterizes the mass communications industries, especially advertising. A recent survey of 450 American advertising men found that 70 percent had changed their jobs within the last two years. Reflecting the rapid changes in consumer preferences, in art and copy styles, and in product lines, the same musical chairs game is played in England. There the circulation of personnel from one agency to another has occasioned cries of alarm within the industry, and many agencies refuse to list an employee as a regular until he has served for a full year.
But perhaps the most dramatic change has overtaken the ranks of management, once well insulated from the jolts of fate that afflicted the less fortunate. 'For the first time in our history,' says Dr. Harold Leavitt, professor of industrial administration and psychology, 'obsolescence seems to be an imminent problem for management because for the first time, the relative advantage of experience over knowledge seems to be rapidly decreasing.' Because it takes longer to train for modern management and the training itself becomes obsolete in a decade or so, as it does with engineers, Leavitt suggests that in the future 'we may have to start planning careers that move downward instead of upward through time ... Perhaps a man should reach his peak of responsibility very early in his career and then expect to be moved downward or outward into simpler, more relaxing, kinds of jobs.'
Whether upward, downward or sideways, the future holds more, not less, turnover in jobs. This realization is already reflected in the altered attitudes of those doing the hiring. 'I used to be concerned whenever I saw a resume with several jobs in it,' admits an official of the Celanese Corporation. 'I would be afraid that the guy was a job-hopper or an opportunist. But I'm not concerned anymore. What I want to know is why he made each move. Even five or six jobs over twenty years could be a plus ... In fact, if I had two equally qualified men, I'd take the man who moved a couple of times for valid reasons over the man who stayed in the same place. Why? I'd know he's adaptable.' The director of executive personnel for International Telephone and Telegraph, Dr. Frank McCabe, says: 'The more successful you are in attracting the comers, the higher your potential turnover rate is. The comers are movers.'
The rising rate of turnover in the executive job market follows peculiar patterns of its own. Thus
Behind all this job jockeying lies not merely the engine of technological innovation, but also the new affluence, which opens new opportunities and at the same time raises expectations for psychological self-fulfillment. 'The man who came up thirty years ago,' says the vice president of industrial relations for Philco, a subsidiary of the Ford Motor Company, 'believed in hanging on to any job until he knew where he was going. But men today seem to feel there's another job right down the pike.' And, for most, there is.
Not infrequently the new job involves not merely a new employer, a new location, and a new set of work associates, but a whole new way of life. Thus the 'serial career' pattern is evidenced by the growing number of people who, once assured of reasonable comfort by the affluent economy, decide to make a full 180-degree turn in their career line at a time of life when others merely look forward to retirement. We learn of a real estate lawyer who leaves his firm to study social science. An advertising agency copy supervisor, after twenty-five years on Madison Avenue, concludes that 'The phony glamour became stale and boring. I simply had to get away from it.' She becomes a librarian. A sales executive in Long Island and an engineer in Illinois leave their jobs to become manual-training teachers. A top interior decorator goes back to school and takes a job with the poverty program.
Each job change implies a step-up of the rate at which people pass through our lives, and as the rate of turnover increases, the duration of relationships declines. This is strikingly manifest in the rise to prominence of temporary help services – the human equivalent of the rental revolution. In the United States today nearly one out of every 100 workers is at some time during the year employed by a so-called 'temporary help service' which, in turn, rents him or her out to industry to fill temporary needs.
Today some 500 temporary help agencies provide industry with an estimated 750,000 short-term workers ranging from secretaries and receptionists, to defense engineers. When the Lycoming Division of Avco Corporation needed 150 design engineers for hurry-up government contracts, it obtained them from a number of rental services. Instead of taking months to recruit them, it was able to assemble a complete staff in short order. Temporary employees have been used in political campaigns to man telephones and mimeograph machines. They have been called in for emergency duty in printing plants, hospitals and factories. They have been used in public relations activities. (In Orlando, Florida, temporaries were hired to give away dollar bills at a shopping center in an attempt to win publicity for the center.) More prosaically, tens of thousands of them fill routine office-work assignments to help the regular staff of large companies through peak-load periods. And one rental company, the Arthur Treacher
