The public debate portrays the middle class as the big losers in recent decades, while people abo... more The public debate portrays the middle class as the big losers in recent decades, while people above and below seemingly fared better in terms of employment and income growth. This narrative is both conceptually and empirically flawed. Based on the Luxembourg Income Study 1980-2020, we show for France, Germany, Poland, Spain, the UK, and the US that middle-class employment expanded, while the working class shrank. The middle class also experienced consistently larger income gains than the working class over the past four decades. The disposable real incomes of working-class households in France, Germany or the US grew by less than half a percent per year, compared to 1% or more for the middle class. Cohort analysis also shows that the promise of doing better than one's parents held for the middle class, but vanished for the working class.
The empirical literature is divided on whether job tenure has declined or remained stable in Euro... more The empirical literature is divided on whether job tenure has declined or remained stable in Europe in recent decades. We argue that three analytical decisions explain the lack of consensus: whether researchers focus on men or women, whether they control for changes in labour market composition and whether the period under study is marked by a recession or a boom. We show the influence of these three decisions by analysing change in job tenure for France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and the UK using two leading surveys: the European Labour Force Survey 1993-2021 and the European Working Conditions Survey 1995-2021. The results show that the share of workers remaining with the same employer for 10 years or more was stable at around 50%. Similarly, the average job tenure remained constant over timeat about 11 yearsbetween 1993 and 2021. Trends in job tenure differ by gender. While the tenure of men remained stable or declined, the tenure of women increased. The stability in job tenure was due to the ageing of the workforce. For a given age, job tenure was shorter in the early 2020s than in the early 1990s.
This chapter discusses the changes in Switzerland’s economy and society between 2000 and 2020, tw... more This chapter discusses the changes in Switzerland’s economy and society between 2000 and 2020, two decades marked by growth: Switzerland’s economy expanded almost without interruption, employment increased to an extent not seen since the 1960s and the population rose by over a fifth. However, productivity only increased slowly and wages grew much less than in earlier boom periods. Over the same period, Switzerland’s social structure changed fundamentally. Educational attainment rose sharply as both the numbers of graduates of Swiss universities and highly qualified immigrants increased. Tertiary education is thus becoming the new norm in Switzerland, replacing apprenticeships as the dominant level of education. Under the influence of strong immigration, Switzerland’s population has also become more diverse. Increasingly highly skilled immigration from a growing number of countries puts an end to a skewed social structure where foreigners from Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ex-Yugoslavia were traditionally relegated to the social hierarchy’s bottom-end. These trends have also altered Switzerland's class structure. Strong job growth in health, education and business services has mainly benefited professionals, managers and technicians. Therefore, the ranks of the salaried middle class expanded, whereas the traditional working class as well as the lower middle class of clerical workers lost ground. The big losers of structural change in recent decades have thus not been the middle class, but the working class.
How does plant closure affect the employment and well-being of displaced workers? This article pr... more How does plant closure affect the employment and well-being of displaced workers? This article presents the results of two surveys of workers at five manufacturing plants two and 11 years after mass layoffs. After two years, two-thirds of displaced workers had been re-employed, one in five workers was still unemployed, and one in 10 workers had retired. A decade after the plant closures, unemployment had fallen below 5%. Overall, post-displacement outcomes in Switzerland were more favourable than in other European plant closures. However, age disparities loomed large. Older workers struggled to find new jobs and often had to accept large wage cuts and unstable jobs. In particular, many workers in their late forties and early fifties were hit hard as they were too young to benefit from early retirement, but too old to start over.
Children from separated parents are more likely to also experience the dissolution of their own u... more Children from separated parents are more likely to also experience the dissolution of their own union. For many children, parental separation thus is an adverse life course event that follows them into adulthood. We examine whether parents' social class mitigates this adversity and weakens the intergenerational transmission of family dissolution for children from advantaged class origins. This is the case if separated parents with more resources are able to offer better living conditions to their children and keep them longer in education, reducing children's incentives for early home-leaving, early cohabitation and early childbearing-three life course choices that increase the risk of later family dissolution. We analyse the existence of such a compensatory class advantage for three birth cohorts in the UK. Based on 38,000 life histories from two panel surveys (BHPS, UKLHS), we find a strong link between parents' family dissolution and offspring's family dissolution, and a reversal in the effect of parents' class on children's risk of family dissolution over the three birth cohorts of the Silent Generation (1925-45), Baby Boomers (1946-64) and Generation X (1965-79). However, there is no evidence that the intergenerational transmission of union dissolution is mitigated by a compensatory class effect for offspring from more advantaged class origins. Regardless of class origin, parents' union dissolution is associated with a much larger risk of union dissolution among their offspring.
Book cover Book cover Withstanding Vulnerability throughout Adult Life , 2023
Few human institutions lend themselves to the study of the interdependencies between the social s... more Few human institutions lend themselves to the study of the interdependencies between the social sphere and the economic sphere as well as the labour market. The issue of how one social domain spills over into another is particularly relevant for the link between personal relationships and employment outcomes. In this chapter, the focus is on two instances of interdependencies between sociability and employment.
Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 2023
Over the last decades, the study of subjective class has been eclipsed by research on objective c... more Over the last decades, the study of subjective class has been eclipsed by research on objective class. The recurrent mismatch between subjective and objective class has led to the common wisdom that self-reported class is a poor measure of people's life chances. This article questions this common wisdom. Based on ISSP 2009 and 2019, it shows for 55 country surveys that a pre-coded question on subjective class accounts for more variance in life chancesincome and wealththan various measures of objective class. Subjective class predicts individual income equally well as does objective class, but is a much better predictor of household income and wealth. It takes the two measures of respondents' and partners' objective class to match the variance explained in household income by a single measure of subjective class. In contexts of limited survey space and interview time, subjective class is an excellent indicator of people's material situation.
Cet article met en lumière les principales tendances économiques et sociales en Suisse au cours d... more Cet article met en lumière les principales tendances économiques et sociales en Suisse au cours des deux décennies entre 2000 et 2020. Cette période a été marquée par la croissance : l'économie suisse a connu une croissance quasi ininterrompue, l'emploi a cru dans des proportions jamais vues depuis les années 1960 et la population a augmenté de plus d'un cinquième. Sur la période, la structure sociale de la Suisse a fondamentalement changé. Le niveau d'éducation a fortement augmenté. D'une part, les hautes écoles suisses ont formé un nombre croissant de résidents. D'autre part, les entreprises suisses ont recruté un nombre croissant d'immigrants européens hautement qualifiés. En conséquence, la formation tertiaire est devenu la nouvelle norme en Suisse, remplaçant l'apprentissage comme niveau d'éducation dominant. En parallèle, la population suisse s'est diversifiée sous l'influence d'une forte immigration. L'immigration de plus en plus qualifiée a mis fin à une structure sociale asymétrique où les étrangers originaires d'Italie, d'Espagne, du Portugal et de l'ex-Yougoslavie étaient traditionnellement relégués au bas de l'échelle sociale. L'article montre que ces changements structurels ont modifié en profondeur la stratification sociale en Suisse. Alors que les rangs de la classe moyenne salariée se sont élargis, la classe ouvrière traditionnelle ainsi que la classe moyenne inférieure des employés de bureau ont perdu du terrain. Par conséquent, les grands perdants du changement structurel de ces dernières décennies n'ont pas été la classe moyenne, mais la classe ouvrière.
This chapter discusses the changes in Switzerland’s economy and society between 2000 and 2020, tw... more This chapter discusses the changes in Switzerland’s economy and society between 2000 and 2020, two decades marked by growth: Switzerland’s economy expanded almost without interruption, employment increased to an extent not seen since the 1960s and the population rose by over a fifth. However, productivity only increased slowly and wages grew much less than in earlier boom periods. Over the same period, Switzerland’s social structure changed fundamentally. Educational attainment rose sharply as both the numbers of graduates of Swiss universities and highly qualified immigrants increased. Tertiary education is thus becoming the new norm in Switzerland, replacing apprenticeships as the dominant level of education. Under the influence of strong immigration, Switzerland’s population has also become more diverse. Increasingly highly skilled immigration from a growing number of countries puts an end to a skewed social structure where foreigners from Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ex-Yugoslavia were traditionally relegated to the social hierarchy’s bottom-end. These trends have also altered Switzerland's class structure. Strong job growth in health, education and business services has mainly benefited professionals, managers and technicians. Therefore, the ranks of the salaried middle class expanded, whereas the traditional working class as well as the lower middle class of clerical workers lost ground. The big losers of structural change in recent decades have thus not been the middle class, but the working class.
JRC Working Papers Series on Social Classes in the Digital Age 2022/01, 2022
A popular thesis in social stratification argues that the middle class is declining. Our chapter ... more A popular thesis in social stratification argues that the middle class is declining. Our chapter argues that this thesis is flawed both conceptually and empirically. Conceptually, it mixes up the middle and working class and, empirically, misrepresents the trends that shape the class structure. Our chapter discusses the main concepts of class and proposes a model that grasps the class structure of contemporary Western societies. Based on clearer concepts, labour force surveys clearly show that the early 21st century did not see the demise, but the expansion of the (salaried) middle class. Never in history had so many people been working in managerial, professional and technical jobs. By contrast, over the last four decades, the working class experienced a massive employment decline – and this decline had far-reaching consequences. It has vastly reduced its political clout as shown in decreasing trade union density and strike activity as well as in rising income inequality. Moreover, it has led to a fundamental realignment of class voting and contributed to growing family instability. Rather than eroding the middle class, the last decades have put an end to the working-class century.
The consensus view among political scientists is that the subjective social status of low-skilled... more The consensus view among political scientists is that the subjective social status of low-skilled workers has declined over the last decades, and this status loss of the working class is seen as contributing to the rise of the radical right. We examine the micro-foundation of this claim by tracing the evolution of subjective status for different social classes in Europe and the US. We use all available survey rounds of the International Social Survey Programme 1987-2017 and replicate findings with the European Social Survey 2002-2016. While unskilled workers perceive their status to be lower than members of the middle class everywhere, we find no relative or absolute fall in their subjective social status over time. Unskilled workers were at the bottom of the status hierarchy in the 1990s and 2010s. Our findings throw doubt on the narrative that sees workers' falling subjective social status as a prominent driver behind the rise of the radical right.
Objective: This article examines how unemployment affects the separation risk of heterosexual cor... more Objective: This article examines how unemployment affects the separation risk of heterosexual coresiding couples, depending on couples' household income and whether men or women become unemployed.
Background: Unemployment may decrease the separation risk as a drop in resources makes separation more costlyor it may increase the separation risk if unemployment creates stress and reduces the quality of couple relations. Moreover, unemployment may be more detrimental for couples if men rather than women, or low-earners rather than high-earners, become unemployed.
Method: This article adopts a couple perspective and assesses heterogeneous effects of unemployment on separation based on longitudinal data-large household panels from Germany and the UK using discrete-time event history models.
Results: For both countries, results show that the annual separation rate almost doubles after an unemployment spell: It increases from 0.9% to 1.6% per year. This effect does not vary when men or women lose their job. The separation risk after unemployment is somewhat higher for low-income couples than high-income couples in the UK, but overall differences are small.
Conclusion: Findings show that unemployment does not strengthen unions, but makes them more vulnerableregardless of which partner becomes unemployed and regardless of a household's economic resources.
Unemployment is a critical life event that may affect the income trajectories of displaced worker... more Unemployment is a critical life event that may affect the income trajectories of displaced workers very unequally. It may lead to cumulative disadvantage and hit vulnerable groups hardest. Alternatively, it may level the playing field because higher classes have more to lose. We analyse heterogeneous effects of unemployment on income for the United Kingdom and Switzerland, using two household panels-Understanding Society 2009-2017 and the Swiss Household Panel 1999-2017-and distinguishing two sources of income: from the labour market and welfare state, at the level of individuals and households. We use a difference-indifferences design by matching unemployed to employed workers and estimating fixed-effects regressions. Results show that individual labour income drops in the 2 years after an unemployment spell by 20 and 25 per cent in Switzerland and by 25 and 55 per cent in the United Kingdom. Welfare state transfers reduce these losses by half in Switzerland, but have only a marginal impact in the United Kingdom. In both countries, income losses do not differ much across social classes. If anything, they are smaller in the working class. We thus find no evidence for cumulative disadvantage. The middle classes face a lower risk of becoming unemployed, but are not less vulnerable to its consequences.
A large literature shows that families with more resources are able to provide better learning en... more A large literature shows that families with more resources are able to provide better learning environments and make more ambitious educational choices for their children. At the end of compulsory education, the result is a social-origin gap in school-track attendance and learning outcomes. Our paper analyses whether this gap further widens thereafter for children with comparable school achievement, and whether the gap varies by gender and migrant status. We examine graduation rates from higher education by combining a cohort study from Switzerland with a reweighting method to match students on their school track, grades, reading literacy and place of residence at the end of compulsory school. The one observed feature that sets them apart is their parents' socioeconomic status. When analysing their graduation rates 14 years later at the age of 30, we find a large social-origin gap. The rate of university completion at age 30 is 20 percentage points higher among students from the highest socioeconomic status quartile than among students from the lowest quartile, even though their school abilities were comparable at age 16. This gap appears to be somewhat smaller among women than men, and among natives than migrants, but differences are not statistically significant. For men and women, migrants and natives alike, abundant parental resources strongly increase the likelihood of university graduation in Switzerland. Key messages • A unique cohort study allows us to follow youth through education from ages 16 to 30. • For youth with the same academic achievement at age 16, university graduation differs widely by class origin. • At 30, the gap in university graduation is over 20 percentage points between the most and least advantaged youth. • Yet there is no social-origin gap for completion of universities of applied sciences.
Older workers who lose their job are at great risk of experiencing long-term unemployment. This v... more Older workers who lose their job are at great risk of experiencing long-term unemployment. This vulnerability can be due to negative selection into unemployment or to age discrimination by employers. We empirically test three explanations of why older jobseekers may struggle to get reemployed: employers promote internal careers; employers prefer younger workers for physically demanding jobs; employers perceive older workers as being too expensive. We answer this question by analysing two experiments in Switzerland. In a factorial survey experiment, 500 recruiters indicated for fictional CVs with ages 35 to 55 the likelihood of an invitation to a job interview. In a natural experiment, 1200 workers were surveyed two years after their plant closed down, allowing us to compare age gaps in reemployment among workers displaced by the same exogenous event. Combining the two experimental methods allows us to increase internal and external validity. Both the factorial survey among recruiters and the survey among displaced workers show large age barriers in hiring. Unemployed workers aged 55 are much less likely to be considered for hiring than those aged 35 with the same productive attributes. This age penalty is larger for blue-collar workers and clerks than upper-level white-collar employees, throwing doubt on the internal career hypothesis. By contrast, results for earnings are consistent with the argument that older workers’ reemployment chances are hampered by high wage costs.
Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 2020
Older workers who lose their job are at great risk of experiencing long-term unemployment. This v... more Older workers who lose their job are at great risk of experiencing long-term unemployment. This vulnerability can be due to negative selection into unemployment or to age discrimination by employers. We empirically test three explanations of why older jobseekers may struggle to get reemployed: employers promote internal careers; employers prefer younger workers for physically demanding jobs; employers perceive older workers as being too expensive. We test these hypotheses by analysing two experiments in Switzerland. In a factorial survey experiment , 500 recruiters indicated for fictional CVs with ages 35-55 the likelihood of an invitation to a job interview. In a natural experiment, 1200 workers were surveyed two years after their plant closed down, allowing us to compare age gaps in reemployment among workers displaced by the same exogenous event. Combining the two experimental methods allows us to increase internal and external validity. Both the factorial survey among recruiters and the survey among displaced workers show large age barriers in hiring. Unemployed workers aged 55 are much less likely to be considered for hiring than those aged 35 with the same productive attributes. This age penalty is larger for blue-collar workers and clerks than upper-level white-collar employees, throwing doubt on the internal career hypothesis. By contrast, results for earnings are consistent with the argument that older workers' reemployment chances are hampered by high wage costs.
The consensus view in economics is that labor markets are polarizing as job creation takes place ... more The consensus view in economics is that labor markets are polarizing as job creation takes place in high-skilled and low-skilled occupations, while jobs shrink in midskilled ones. The authors argue that, in theoretical terms, polarization runs counter to all the trends that shaped the job structure over the past decades: skill-biased technological change, the international division of labor, and educational expansion. The authors then show that the polarization thesis does not hold empirically. They use the European Labor Force Survey to analyze occupational change for Germany, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom from 1992 to 2015 and define good and bad occupations with four alternative indicators of job quality: earnings, education, prestige, and job satisfaction. Job growth was by far strongest in occupations with high job quality and weakest in occupations with low job
After the Great Recession, vocational training was strongly promoted across the OECD as a measure... more After the Great Recession, vocational training was strongly promoted across the OECD as a measure to fight youth unemployment. Vocational degrees may give workers a head start in the labour market. However, these degrees may also become obsolete sooner and leave older workers vulnerable to technological change. We thus compare the evolution of employment and earnings over the life course for holders of vocational and general education at the upper-secondary level. We use a cohort design for Switzerland, the OECD country with the highest share of youth undertaking vocational education. Based on the Swiss Labour Force Survey 1991-2014 and the Swiss Household Panel 1999-2015, our results show that employment prospects remain as good for vocational as for general education over the second half of workers' careers. However, vocational education is associated with substantially lower earnings once workers enter their thirties, and this disadvantage is larger among women than men. While vocational degrees protect against unemployment, they come at the cost of flat earnings curves over the life course.
According to a popular argument in economics, the gender wage gap persists not because of employe... more According to a popular argument in economics, the gender wage gap persists not because of employer discrimination against women, but because of the differential investment of fathers and mothers into paid work and the household. We test this argument by comparing the evolution of wages between men and women before the onset of family formation and gendered household specialization. We use a cohort study of young adults for Switzerland (TREE 2000-2014) and match the two sexes on their intellectual ability and educational attainment before they enter the labour market. We then use the ensuing survey waves to account for human capital and job characteristics as well as for values towards work and family. We replicate our analysis with a second panel study of Swiss graduate students. We find in both cohort studies an unexplained gender wage gap of between 3 to 6 percent in favour of men. This result suggests that young women earn lower wages than young men with the same productive characteristics long before they have children. Translated into annual wages, this means that young women lose out on half a monthly wage each year in comparison to young men.
The public debate portrays the middle class as the big losers in recent decades, while people abo... more The public debate portrays the middle class as the big losers in recent decades, while people above and below seemingly fared better in terms of employment and income growth. This narrative is both conceptually and empirically flawed. Based on the Luxembourg Income Study 1980-2020, we show for France, Germany, Poland, Spain, the UK, and the US that middle-class employment expanded, while the working class shrank. The middle class also experienced consistently larger income gains than the working class over the past four decades. The disposable real incomes of working-class households in France, Germany or the US grew by less than half a percent per year, compared to 1% or more for the middle class. Cohort analysis also shows that the promise of doing better than one's parents held for the middle class, but vanished for the working class.
The empirical literature is divided on whether job tenure has declined or remained stable in Euro... more The empirical literature is divided on whether job tenure has declined or remained stable in Europe in recent decades. We argue that three analytical decisions explain the lack of consensus: whether researchers focus on men or women, whether they control for changes in labour market composition and whether the period under study is marked by a recession or a boom. We show the influence of these three decisions by analysing change in job tenure for France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and the UK using two leading surveys: the European Labour Force Survey 1993-2021 and the European Working Conditions Survey 1995-2021. The results show that the share of workers remaining with the same employer for 10 years or more was stable at around 50%. Similarly, the average job tenure remained constant over timeat about 11 yearsbetween 1993 and 2021. Trends in job tenure differ by gender. While the tenure of men remained stable or declined, the tenure of women increased. The stability in job tenure was due to the ageing of the workforce. For a given age, job tenure was shorter in the early 2020s than in the early 1990s.
This chapter discusses the changes in Switzerland’s economy and society between 2000 and 2020, tw... more This chapter discusses the changes in Switzerland’s economy and society between 2000 and 2020, two decades marked by growth: Switzerland’s economy expanded almost without interruption, employment increased to an extent not seen since the 1960s and the population rose by over a fifth. However, productivity only increased slowly and wages grew much less than in earlier boom periods. Over the same period, Switzerland’s social structure changed fundamentally. Educational attainment rose sharply as both the numbers of graduates of Swiss universities and highly qualified immigrants increased. Tertiary education is thus becoming the new norm in Switzerland, replacing apprenticeships as the dominant level of education. Under the influence of strong immigration, Switzerland’s population has also become more diverse. Increasingly highly skilled immigration from a growing number of countries puts an end to a skewed social structure where foreigners from Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ex-Yugoslavia were traditionally relegated to the social hierarchy’s bottom-end. These trends have also altered Switzerland's class structure. Strong job growth in health, education and business services has mainly benefited professionals, managers and technicians. Therefore, the ranks of the salaried middle class expanded, whereas the traditional working class as well as the lower middle class of clerical workers lost ground. The big losers of structural change in recent decades have thus not been the middle class, but the working class.
How does plant closure affect the employment and well-being of displaced workers? This article pr... more How does plant closure affect the employment and well-being of displaced workers? This article presents the results of two surveys of workers at five manufacturing plants two and 11 years after mass layoffs. After two years, two-thirds of displaced workers had been re-employed, one in five workers was still unemployed, and one in 10 workers had retired. A decade after the plant closures, unemployment had fallen below 5%. Overall, post-displacement outcomes in Switzerland were more favourable than in other European plant closures. However, age disparities loomed large. Older workers struggled to find new jobs and often had to accept large wage cuts and unstable jobs. In particular, many workers in their late forties and early fifties were hit hard as they were too young to benefit from early retirement, but too old to start over.
Children from separated parents are more likely to also experience the dissolution of their own u... more Children from separated parents are more likely to also experience the dissolution of their own union. For many children, parental separation thus is an adverse life course event that follows them into adulthood. We examine whether parents' social class mitigates this adversity and weakens the intergenerational transmission of family dissolution for children from advantaged class origins. This is the case if separated parents with more resources are able to offer better living conditions to their children and keep them longer in education, reducing children's incentives for early home-leaving, early cohabitation and early childbearing-three life course choices that increase the risk of later family dissolution. We analyse the existence of such a compensatory class advantage for three birth cohorts in the UK. Based on 38,000 life histories from two panel surveys (BHPS, UKLHS), we find a strong link between parents' family dissolution and offspring's family dissolution, and a reversal in the effect of parents' class on children's risk of family dissolution over the three birth cohorts of the Silent Generation (1925-45), Baby Boomers (1946-64) and Generation X (1965-79). However, there is no evidence that the intergenerational transmission of union dissolution is mitigated by a compensatory class effect for offspring from more advantaged class origins. Regardless of class origin, parents' union dissolution is associated with a much larger risk of union dissolution among their offspring.
Book cover Book cover Withstanding Vulnerability throughout Adult Life , 2023
Few human institutions lend themselves to the study of the interdependencies between the social s... more Few human institutions lend themselves to the study of the interdependencies between the social sphere and the economic sphere as well as the labour market. The issue of how one social domain spills over into another is particularly relevant for the link between personal relationships and employment outcomes. In this chapter, the focus is on two instances of interdependencies between sociability and employment.
Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 2023
Over the last decades, the study of subjective class has been eclipsed by research on objective c... more Over the last decades, the study of subjective class has been eclipsed by research on objective class. The recurrent mismatch between subjective and objective class has led to the common wisdom that self-reported class is a poor measure of people's life chances. This article questions this common wisdom. Based on ISSP 2009 and 2019, it shows for 55 country surveys that a pre-coded question on subjective class accounts for more variance in life chancesincome and wealththan various measures of objective class. Subjective class predicts individual income equally well as does objective class, but is a much better predictor of household income and wealth. It takes the two measures of respondents' and partners' objective class to match the variance explained in household income by a single measure of subjective class. In contexts of limited survey space and interview time, subjective class is an excellent indicator of people's material situation.
Cet article met en lumière les principales tendances économiques et sociales en Suisse au cours d... more Cet article met en lumière les principales tendances économiques et sociales en Suisse au cours des deux décennies entre 2000 et 2020. Cette période a été marquée par la croissance : l'économie suisse a connu une croissance quasi ininterrompue, l'emploi a cru dans des proportions jamais vues depuis les années 1960 et la population a augmenté de plus d'un cinquième. Sur la période, la structure sociale de la Suisse a fondamentalement changé. Le niveau d'éducation a fortement augmenté. D'une part, les hautes écoles suisses ont formé un nombre croissant de résidents. D'autre part, les entreprises suisses ont recruté un nombre croissant d'immigrants européens hautement qualifiés. En conséquence, la formation tertiaire est devenu la nouvelle norme en Suisse, remplaçant l'apprentissage comme niveau d'éducation dominant. En parallèle, la population suisse s'est diversifiée sous l'influence d'une forte immigration. L'immigration de plus en plus qualifiée a mis fin à une structure sociale asymétrique où les étrangers originaires d'Italie, d'Espagne, du Portugal et de l'ex-Yougoslavie étaient traditionnellement relégués au bas de l'échelle sociale. L'article montre que ces changements structurels ont modifié en profondeur la stratification sociale en Suisse. Alors que les rangs de la classe moyenne salariée se sont élargis, la classe ouvrière traditionnelle ainsi que la classe moyenne inférieure des employés de bureau ont perdu du terrain. Par conséquent, les grands perdants du changement structurel de ces dernières décennies n'ont pas été la classe moyenne, mais la classe ouvrière.
This chapter discusses the changes in Switzerland’s economy and society between 2000 and 2020, tw... more This chapter discusses the changes in Switzerland’s economy and society between 2000 and 2020, two decades marked by growth: Switzerland’s economy expanded almost without interruption, employment increased to an extent not seen since the 1960s and the population rose by over a fifth. However, productivity only increased slowly and wages grew much less than in earlier boom periods. Over the same period, Switzerland’s social structure changed fundamentally. Educational attainment rose sharply as both the numbers of graduates of Swiss universities and highly qualified immigrants increased. Tertiary education is thus becoming the new norm in Switzerland, replacing apprenticeships as the dominant level of education. Under the influence of strong immigration, Switzerland’s population has also become more diverse. Increasingly highly skilled immigration from a growing number of countries puts an end to a skewed social structure where foreigners from Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ex-Yugoslavia were traditionally relegated to the social hierarchy’s bottom-end. These trends have also altered Switzerland's class structure. Strong job growth in health, education and business services has mainly benefited professionals, managers and technicians. Therefore, the ranks of the salaried middle class expanded, whereas the traditional working class as well as the lower middle class of clerical workers lost ground. The big losers of structural change in recent decades have thus not been the middle class, but the working class.
JRC Working Papers Series on Social Classes in the Digital Age 2022/01, 2022
A popular thesis in social stratification argues that the middle class is declining. Our chapter ... more A popular thesis in social stratification argues that the middle class is declining. Our chapter argues that this thesis is flawed both conceptually and empirically. Conceptually, it mixes up the middle and working class and, empirically, misrepresents the trends that shape the class structure. Our chapter discusses the main concepts of class and proposes a model that grasps the class structure of contemporary Western societies. Based on clearer concepts, labour force surveys clearly show that the early 21st century did not see the demise, but the expansion of the (salaried) middle class. Never in history had so many people been working in managerial, professional and technical jobs. By contrast, over the last four decades, the working class experienced a massive employment decline – and this decline had far-reaching consequences. It has vastly reduced its political clout as shown in decreasing trade union density and strike activity as well as in rising income inequality. Moreover, it has led to a fundamental realignment of class voting and contributed to growing family instability. Rather than eroding the middle class, the last decades have put an end to the working-class century.
The consensus view among political scientists is that the subjective social status of low-skilled... more The consensus view among political scientists is that the subjective social status of low-skilled workers has declined over the last decades, and this status loss of the working class is seen as contributing to the rise of the radical right. We examine the micro-foundation of this claim by tracing the evolution of subjective status for different social classes in Europe and the US. We use all available survey rounds of the International Social Survey Programme 1987-2017 and replicate findings with the European Social Survey 2002-2016. While unskilled workers perceive their status to be lower than members of the middle class everywhere, we find no relative or absolute fall in their subjective social status over time. Unskilled workers were at the bottom of the status hierarchy in the 1990s and 2010s. Our findings throw doubt on the narrative that sees workers' falling subjective social status as a prominent driver behind the rise of the radical right.
Objective: This article examines how unemployment affects the separation risk of heterosexual cor... more Objective: This article examines how unemployment affects the separation risk of heterosexual coresiding couples, depending on couples' household income and whether men or women become unemployed.
Background: Unemployment may decrease the separation risk as a drop in resources makes separation more costlyor it may increase the separation risk if unemployment creates stress and reduces the quality of couple relations. Moreover, unemployment may be more detrimental for couples if men rather than women, or low-earners rather than high-earners, become unemployed.
Method: This article adopts a couple perspective and assesses heterogeneous effects of unemployment on separation based on longitudinal data-large household panels from Germany and the UK using discrete-time event history models.
Results: For both countries, results show that the annual separation rate almost doubles after an unemployment spell: It increases from 0.9% to 1.6% per year. This effect does not vary when men or women lose their job. The separation risk after unemployment is somewhat higher for low-income couples than high-income couples in the UK, but overall differences are small.
Conclusion: Findings show that unemployment does not strengthen unions, but makes them more vulnerableregardless of which partner becomes unemployed and regardless of a household's economic resources.
Unemployment is a critical life event that may affect the income trajectories of displaced worker... more Unemployment is a critical life event that may affect the income trajectories of displaced workers very unequally. It may lead to cumulative disadvantage and hit vulnerable groups hardest. Alternatively, it may level the playing field because higher classes have more to lose. We analyse heterogeneous effects of unemployment on income for the United Kingdom and Switzerland, using two household panels-Understanding Society 2009-2017 and the Swiss Household Panel 1999-2017-and distinguishing two sources of income: from the labour market and welfare state, at the level of individuals and households. We use a difference-indifferences design by matching unemployed to employed workers and estimating fixed-effects regressions. Results show that individual labour income drops in the 2 years after an unemployment spell by 20 and 25 per cent in Switzerland and by 25 and 55 per cent in the United Kingdom. Welfare state transfers reduce these losses by half in Switzerland, but have only a marginal impact in the United Kingdom. In both countries, income losses do not differ much across social classes. If anything, they are smaller in the working class. We thus find no evidence for cumulative disadvantage. The middle classes face a lower risk of becoming unemployed, but are not less vulnerable to its consequences.
A large literature shows that families with more resources are able to provide better learning en... more A large literature shows that families with more resources are able to provide better learning environments and make more ambitious educational choices for their children. At the end of compulsory education, the result is a social-origin gap in school-track attendance and learning outcomes. Our paper analyses whether this gap further widens thereafter for children with comparable school achievement, and whether the gap varies by gender and migrant status. We examine graduation rates from higher education by combining a cohort study from Switzerland with a reweighting method to match students on their school track, grades, reading literacy and place of residence at the end of compulsory school. The one observed feature that sets them apart is their parents' socioeconomic status. When analysing their graduation rates 14 years later at the age of 30, we find a large social-origin gap. The rate of university completion at age 30 is 20 percentage points higher among students from the highest socioeconomic status quartile than among students from the lowest quartile, even though their school abilities were comparable at age 16. This gap appears to be somewhat smaller among women than men, and among natives than migrants, but differences are not statistically significant. For men and women, migrants and natives alike, abundant parental resources strongly increase the likelihood of university graduation in Switzerland. Key messages • A unique cohort study allows us to follow youth through education from ages 16 to 30. • For youth with the same academic achievement at age 16, university graduation differs widely by class origin. • At 30, the gap in university graduation is over 20 percentage points between the most and least advantaged youth. • Yet there is no social-origin gap for completion of universities of applied sciences.
Older workers who lose their job are at great risk of experiencing long-term unemployment. This v... more Older workers who lose their job are at great risk of experiencing long-term unemployment. This vulnerability can be due to negative selection into unemployment or to age discrimination by employers. We empirically test three explanations of why older jobseekers may struggle to get reemployed: employers promote internal careers; employers prefer younger workers for physically demanding jobs; employers perceive older workers as being too expensive. We answer this question by analysing two experiments in Switzerland. In a factorial survey experiment, 500 recruiters indicated for fictional CVs with ages 35 to 55 the likelihood of an invitation to a job interview. In a natural experiment, 1200 workers were surveyed two years after their plant closed down, allowing us to compare age gaps in reemployment among workers displaced by the same exogenous event. Combining the two experimental methods allows us to increase internal and external validity. Both the factorial survey among recruiters and the survey among displaced workers show large age barriers in hiring. Unemployed workers aged 55 are much less likely to be considered for hiring than those aged 35 with the same productive attributes. This age penalty is larger for blue-collar workers and clerks than upper-level white-collar employees, throwing doubt on the internal career hypothesis. By contrast, results for earnings are consistent with the argument that older workers’ reemployment chances are hampered by high wage costs.
Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 2020
Older workers who lose their job are at great risk of experiencing long-term unemployment. This v... more Older workers who lose their job are at great risk of experiencing long-term unemployment. This vulnerability can be due to negative selection into unemployment or to age discrimination by employers. We empirically test three explanations of why older jobseekers may struggle to get reemployed: employers promote internal careers; employers prefer younger workers for physically demanding jobs; employers perceive older workers as being too expensive. We test these hypotheses by analysing two experiments in Switzerland. In a factorial survey experiment , 500 recruiters indicated for fictional CVs with ages 35-55 the likelihood of an invitation to a job interview. In a natural experiment, 1200 workers were surveyed two years after their plant closed down, allowing us to compare age gaps in reemployment among workers displaced by the same exogenous event. Combining the two experimental methods allows us to increase internal and external validity. Both the factorial survey among recruiters and the survey among displaced workers show large age barriers in hiring. Unemployed workers aged 55 are much less likely to be considered for hiring than those aged 35 with the same productive attributes. This age penalty is larger for blue-collar workers and clerks than upper-level white-collar employees, throwing doubt on the internal career hypothesis. By contrast, results for earnings are consistent with the argument that older workers' reemployment chances are hampered by high wage costs.
The consensus view in economics is that labor markets are polarizing as job creation takes place ... more The consensus view in economics is that labor markets are polarizing as job creation takes place in high-skilled and low-skilled occupations, while jobs shrink in midskilled ones. The authors argue that, in theoretical terms, polarization runs counter to all the trends that shaped the job structure over the past decades: skill-biased technological change, the international division of labor, and educational expansion. The authors then show that the polarization thesis does not hold empirically. They use the European Labor Force Survey to analyze occupational change for Germany, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom from 1992 to 2015 and define good and bad occupations with four alternative indicators of job quality: earnings, education, prestige, and job satisfaction. Job growth was by far strongest in occupations with high job quality and weakest in occupations with low job
After the Great Recession, vocational training was strongly promoted across the OECD as a measure... more After the Great Recession, vocational training was strongly promoted across the OECD as a measure to fight youth unemployment. Vocational degrees may give workers a head start in the labour market. However, these degrees may also become obsolete sooner and leave older workers vulnerable to technological change. We thus compare the evolution of employment and earnings over the life course for holders of vocational and general education at the upper-secondary level. We use a cohort design for Switzerland, the OECD country with the highest share of youth undertaking vocational education. Based on the Swiss Labour Force Survey 1991-2014 and the Swiss Household Panel 1999-2015, our results show that employment prospects remain as good for vocational as for general education over the second half of workers' careers. However, vocational education is associated with substantially lower earnings once workers enter their thirties, and this disadvantage is larger among women than men. While vocational degrees protect against unemployment, they come at the cost of flat earnings curves over the life course.
According to a popular argument in economics, the gender wage gap persists not because of employe... more According to a popular argument in economics, the gender wage gap persists not because of employer discrimination against women, but because of the differential investment of fathers and mothers into paid work and the household. We test this argument by comparing the evolution of wages between men and women before the onset of family formation and gendered household specialization. We use a cohort study of young adults for Switzerland (TREE 2000-2014) and match the two sexes on their intellectual ability and educational attainment before they enter the labour market. We then use the ensuing survey waves to account for human capital and job characteristics as well as for values towards work and family. We replicate our analysis with a second panel study of Swiss graduate students. We find in both cohort studies an unexplained gender wage gap of between 3 to 6 percent in favour of men. This result suggests that young women earn lower wages than young men with the same productive characteristics long before they have children. Translated into annual wages, this means that young women lose out on half a monthly wage each year in comparison to young men.
The Oxford Handbook of Social Stratification, 2023
A popular thesis in social strati cation maintains that the middle class is declining. This chapt... more A popular thesis in social strati cation maintains that the middle class is declining. This chapter argues that this thesis is awed both conceptually and empirically. Conceptually, it mixes up the middle class and the working class, and empirically, it misrepresents the trends that shape the class structure. The chapter discusses the concept of social class and proposes a model that grasps the class structure of contemporary Western societies. Based on the conceptual distinction between the middle class and the working class, labor force surveys clearly show that the early twenty-rst century saw, not the demise, but the expansion of the (salaried) middle class in the Western world. Never in history have so many people worked in managerial, professional, and technical jobs as do so today. By contrast, over the last four decades, the working class has experienced a massive employment decline-with far-reaching consequences. The political clout of the working class has declined, as is illustrated by decreasing trade union density and strike activity and in rising income inequality. Moreover, working-class decline has led to a fundamental realignment of class voting and contributed to growing family instability. Instead of eroding the middle class, the last decades have thus put an end to the working-class century.
This chapter discusses the changes in Switzerland’s economy and society between 2000 and 2020, tw... more This chapter discusses the changes in Switzerland’s economy and society between 2000 and 2020, two decades marked by growth: Switzerland’s economy expanded almost without interruption, employment increased to an extent not seen since the 1960s and the population rose by over a fifth. However, productivity only increased slowly and wages grew much less than in earlier boom periods. Over the same period, Switzerland’s social structure changed fundamentally. Educational attainment rose sharply as both the numbers of graduates of Swiss universities and highly qualified immigrants increased. Tertiary education is thus becoming the new norm in Switzerland, replacing apprenticeships as the dominant level of education. Under the influence of strong immigration, Switzerland’s population has also become more diverse. Increasingly highly skilled immigration from a growing number of countries puts an end to a skewed social structure where foreigners from Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ex-Yugoslavia were traditionally relegated to the social hierarchy’s bottom-end. These trends have also altered Switzerland's class structure. Strong job growth in health, education and business services has mainly benefited professionals, managers and technicians. Therefore, the ranks of the salaried middle class expanded, whereas the traditional working class as well as the lower middle class of clerical workers lost ground. The big losers of structural change in recent decades have thus not been the middle class, but the working class.
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Papers by Daniel Oesch
Background: Unemployment may decrease the separation risk as a drop in resources makes separation more costlyor it may increase the separation risk if unemployment creates stress and reduces the quality of couple relations. Moreover, unemployment may be more detrimental for couples if men rather than women, or low-earners rather than high-earners, become unemployed.
Method: This article adopts a couple perspective and assesses heterogeneous effects of unemployment on separation based on longitudinal data-large household panels from Germany and the UK using discrete-time event history models.
Results: For both countries, results show that the annual separation rate almost doubles after an unemployment spell: It increases from 0.9% to 1.6% per year. This effect does not vary when men or women lose their job. The separation risk after unemployment is somewhat higher for low-income couples than high-income couples in the UK, but overall differences are small.
Conclusion: Findings show that unemployment does not strengthen unions, but makes them more vulnerableregardless of which partner becomes unemployed and regardless of a household's economic resources.
validity. Both the factorial survey among recruiters and the survey among displaced workers show large age barriers in hiring. Unemployed workers aged 55 are much less likely to be considered for hiring than those aged 35 with the same productive attributes. This age penalty is larger for blue-collar workers and clerks than upper-level white-collar employees, throwing doubt on the internal career hypothesis. By
contrast, results for earnings are consistent with the argument that older workers’ reemployment chances are hampered by high wage costs.
Background: Unemployment may decrease the separation risk as a drop in resources makes separation more costlyor it may increase the separation risk if unemployment creates stress and reduces the quality of couple relations. Moreover, unemployment may be more detrimental for couples if men rather than women, or low-earners rather than high-earners, become unemployed.
Method: This article adopts a couple perspective and assesses heterogeneous effects of unemployment on separation based on longitudinal data-large household panels from Germany and the UK using discrete-time event history models.
Results: For both countries, results show that the annual separation rate almost doubles after an unemployment spell: It increases from 0.9% to 1.6% per year. This effect does not vary when men or women lose their job. The separation risk after unemployment is somewhat higher for low-income couples than high-income couples in the UK, but overall differences are small.
Conclusion: Findings show that unemployment does not strengthen unions, but makes them more vulnerableregardless of which partner becomes unemployed and regardless of a household's economic resources.
validity. Both the factorial survey among recruiters and the survey among displaced workers show large age barriers in hiring. Unemployed workers aged 55 are much less likely to be considered for hiring than those aged 35 with the same productive attributes. This age penalty is larger for blue-collar workers and clerks than upper-level white-collar employees, throwing doubt on the internal career hypothesis. By
contrast, results for earnings are consistent with the argument that older workers’ reemployment chances are hampered by high wage costs.