Using longitudinal surveys to discuss labour force stability: A New Zealand case study

Labour market stability is an underexamined characteristic in traditional labour market statistics, despite its importance. Labour market instability can negatively impact people’s wellbeing and incomes by locking short-term employees out of tenure dependent employment protections and limiting intermittently jobless people’s access to social protection schemes. Conversely, while not all stable circumstances are necessarily positive ones, stability is generally a desirable characteristic, bringing with it social and economic benefits. Here, we present a supplementary measure to traditional labour market statistics that treats stability as a characteristic of individuals. We used a subsample of consistent respondents from New Zealand’s Household Labour Force Survey (HLFS) to demonstrate how best to create and apply an alternative measure of the stability of individuals across longitudinal survey datasets, including a description of our approach and remaining limitations, in a way that complements pre-existing stability measures like duration of unemployment, job tenure, and LEED employment turnover. The descriptive statistics we produce reveal that completely stable employment and lack of labour force participation over the surveyed period were common and highly correlated with age. Instability – here defined as experiencing 3 or more labour market changes over two years – was most common amongst younger adults, though a lingering minority of people continue to experience highly unstable labour market outcomes in each age group. Stable unemployment or underutilisation proved rare, but respondents experiencing high instability were also unemployed and/or underutilised much more frequently across the two-year surveyed period than more stable respondents.