Job Mobility and Segmentation in Australian City Labour Markets

By Anthea Bill, Bill Mitchell and Riccardo Welters

Cities have developed a unique potential for achieving successful outcomes, by virtue of their scale, networks and advanced service functions. These attributes are said to have afforded city workers higher earnings and greater opportunity to appropriate productivity gains through job mobility.

However the benefits of job mobility arguably accrue only to those individuals located in dynamic local labour markets and in growing occupations with 'deep' skill-sets. The flipside of flexibility is more insecurity, associated with casualisation and intense job competition for low-skilled positions. Thus we might argue in cities, increased flexibility spurs career advancement in the primary segment of the labour market, while increased insecurity obstructs career advancement in the secondary segment. Work to date has identified that there are significant differences between cities and their non-metropolitan counterparts in terms of the motivations for job search and the nature of job transition, holding other factors.

This paper attempts to extend these findings using four waves of Household Income and Labour Dynamics Australia (HILDA) data, to examine whether cities do promote greater levels of mobility and whether primary and secondary labour market participants display different patterns of search and occupational transition in urban versus non-urban areas.

(Paper presented at HILDA Survey Research Conference 2007; Thursday 19 and Friday 20 July. Published July 2007)