Australians are changing jobs far less often than they did 50 years ago. Financial insecurity, debt and workplace barriers may be trapping workers in jobs – and helping entrench a low-productivity form of “cosy capitalism”.

Fifty years ago work was different, wasn’t it? Your first job on leaving school was at the bottom of the hierarchy – filing, making coffee or cleaning up the building site. If all went well you would move through the ranks and retire from the same firm or government department having achieved a middle or senior rank. That was before there was a gig economy, before computers allowed people to set up their own microbusinesses, and before the word ‘precariat’ had been coined.

What a pity the ABS has challenged this myth with hard data in their annual series on Job Mobility. In the 1970s on average 17 per cent of workers changed their employer or business in any one year: now only 8 per cent of workers do. We’re staying much longer in our jobs. This series, going back to 1972, is shown below.

The trend is clearly towards less mobility, interrupted by the occasional economic shock – the ‘recession we had to have’ in 1990, and the pandemic in 2020.

One might have expected that increased female participation in the workforce would have seen more mobility, but women have followed the same trend as men:........

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