Labor force change in Germany since 1882: A life cycle perspective

Abstract

Only as far as the two oldest cohorts are concerned can we speak of a majority still working in agrarian jobs. Beginning with the men born in the middle of the last century, the main occupation shifts to mining and industry. This continued to be true for all cohorts during following 100 years. The development of the youngest cohorts seems to show that at the end of the occupational life, their members will be more strongly represented in the service sector than in the manufacturing branches. Using the cohort approach, this transition from an agrarian society to an industrial one and the further development of a society organized around the offer of services, could have been handled through the demographic turnover of the potential labor force rather than through occupational shifts by individuals. For the present, the empirical analyses can be summarized as follows. A general pattern of occupational structural change at the cohort level covering all branches of the economy does not exist for Germany. In the agricultural area, which showed a permanent and strong decrease of the work force, the entry placements of younger people stayed relatively high until the 1950s and went along with an increasing exit mobility during the employment life. Surprisingly, in the expanding secondary sector, one can find an age structure similar to that existing in the agricultural sector. The rapid growth of service sector occupations was not accomplished by an enlarged recruitment of younger people, but rather by the entry of cohort members at a later time in their occupational life. Relative to the sectoral extension, the entrance of younger people into the tertiary sector was distinctly lower. Extending over all sectors, the cohort succession shows a development of the entry placements and job mobility, which can, ex post, be characterized as an increasingly faulty allocation of young persons. Within the societal development, the younger labor force—especially during the time of stagnation until 1950—represented, more and more, an older sectoral occupational structure rather than a modern one. This fact, and the consequence of an increasingly higher mobility during the working life, led to episodes of general social reallocation which exceeded by several times the minimum of individual moves required to handle the structural change of the occupational system. As to the membership of worker and white-collar positions during life, remarkable (not yet explained theoretically) and socially far-reaching results were found. The fast demographic exchange of the industrial workers and the increasing transformation of dependent nonmanual workplaces to career positions have to be emphasized especially. These events were superimposed upon the sectoral regrouping of the work force through extensive vertical mobility. To a great extent a very old life cycle structure could be applied to the four oldest cohorts: one stayed in the economic area which one entered as a young person or as a family member. In the course of life, one passed through the social stages of apprentice-journeyman-self-employed. Starting with the VIth cohort, born in the 5 years before the first occupation census in the German Reich, the sectoral mobility constantly increased, and older social positions, like journeymen and assistant, quantitatively developed from more periods in one's life to the destiny in one's life. Newer social positions, like employees, which at the beginning were introduced as permanent positions and were supposed to create a separate social class, became typically intragenerationally achievable ends. In the years around the First World War and then again in the fifties, the change of such life cycle patterns became very pronounced. All cohorts born between 1860 and 1945, it appears, have experienced the change of the occupational system during their working life in a much more intensive way than the shifting of the labor force as seen by a comparison of cross-sectional distributions over time. Research on life-stage dependent allocation to different types of occupation could help to find an explanation for the high structural mobility. But through an international comparison 21 21 As far as they are comparable the results for Germany appear to be in remarkable contrast to those found for the United States (Goldin, 1984) and Great Britain (Heim, 1984). it would be possible to determine whether the findings apply only to Germany or can be interpreted as a general pattern of adaption to structural changes.