Are lifetime jobs disappearing? Is the "Great American Job" gone, as Time magazine insists? Have job security and tenure with the same company deteriorated over the last 20 years, as many believe?

The answer is that long-term jobs in the United States are as common as ever. The difference is in who holds them.

• Men with less than 12 years of schooling are substantially less likely to work at long-term jobs today than they were 20 years ago.

• By contrast, women with at least 12 years of schooling are much more likely to work at long-term jobs than they were 20 years ago.

This finding emerges from a sophisticated statistical study using Census Bureau data for eight selected years from 1973 to 1993.

In the 1970s, men at all skill levels tended to hold long-term jobs to some extent. High-skilled men still have much the same tenure experience, despite all the corporate downsizing and the stories about unemployed white men who have been laid off from good jobs.

These results are consistent with the fact that the wage differential between high-skilled and low-skilled men widened significantly during the late 1970s and 1980s, while the wage differential between men and women narrowed. The economic position of the least-educated men has deteriorated over the last 15 years.

If these are the facts, why are so many people who are not low-skilled men so gloomy about job security?

It may be that growing numbers of educated workers expected a risk-free future and were disappointed that adjustments to a changing world are still necessary. Or perhaps the fall in job longevity among low-skilled men has been emphasized and the increased job tenure among women overlooked.

A strong possibility, however, is that the job security issue actually reflects a concern over the decline in real wage growth since the early 1970s.

• Between 1947 and 1973, real hour-ly compensation grew 3.1 percent per year.

• But the growth of real hourly compensation has averaged only 0.5 percent per year since 1973.

At such low rates of growth in real compensation, many Americans inevitably suffer a decline in their living standards.

Source: Henry S. Farber, "Are Lifetime Jobs Disappearing? Job Duration in the United States: 1973-1993," presented at the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth (CRIW) Labor Statistics Measurement Issues Conference, December 15-16, 1994, Washington DC.