Internal Labor Markets and Earnings Trajectories in the Post-Fordist Economy: An Analysis of Recent Trends

The evolution of the “post-Fordist” economy is alleged to have changed the structure of work careers in the American work force of the 1990s. Most scholarly attention has focused on the implications of post-Fordism for job mobility or for the fraction of the workforce that has a “contingent” employment relationship with the employer. But post-Fordism should also affect the relationship between job rewards and tenure with the employer, which sociologists have recognized as a core characteristic of the firm internal labor market. The theory of post-Fordism predicts a weaker relationship between tenure and job rewards and a correspondingly stronger relationship between general labor force experience and job rewards for the highly educated workers that arguably have become an even more dominant source of value creation in the post-Fordist economy. Analyses of trend data for male workers from the Current Population Surveys for the years 1983–1998 largely support these hypotheses. Additional analyses suggest that observed trends in the returns to job tenure and experience arise from real changes in the production of value rather than from selection mechanisms linked to post-Fordist-induced trends in the structure of job mobility. © 2002 Elsevier Science (USA)