Bridges or traps? Casualisation and labour market transitions in Australia

In this article, I re-examine the familiar debate on whether casual jobs represent a ‘bridge’ into permanent employment or a ‘trap’ that keeps workers locked into ongoing casualised work or joblessness. My analysis looks at the labour market destinations of casual workers over time, making use of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey data for the period 2001 to 2009. The novelty of my approach is twofold. First, I examine an extensive range of individual, locality and job characteristics to assess which of these are most strongly associated with various labour market destinations. Second, I conduct the analysis using longitudinal panel data, in which I make use of random intercepts multinomial logit panel models to estimate various conditional predicted probabilities for these destinations. The findings show that as far as individual characteristics are concerned, age and years in paid employment matter a great deal, while education matters much less. Increasing age leads t...