Most mobility takes place at the outset of an individual’s occupational career. Individuals need this mobility to learn the market conditions and find posts that maximize the alignment of their credentials and their wages. We regard the Intifada that triggered a deep recession in 2001-2003 and dampened labor demand in all industries other than guards and security personnel as an exogenous shock to the labor market. This shock transformed the guard and security industry, which hitherto had provided provisional employment for people who had not yet begun their vocational careers, into a source of long-term employment at long hours. Our research hypothesis is that protracted employment in this industry due to the weakness of the labor market denied “healthy” occupational mobility to the cohort of young adults who joined the industry during the Intifada. Thus, the careers of members of this cohort were rerouted to a flatter trajectory of wage increase than that of the cohort of young adults who joined the same industry before the Intifada and eventually abandoned it in favor of positions in other industries.
The study yields four main findings. First, joining the guard and security industry during the Intifada made young adults more likely than members of the pre-Intifada cohort to work in this industry in the long term. Second, the cohort that joined the industry during the Intifada is typified by less occupational mobility than the cohort that joined it previously. Third, the cohort that joined the industry during the Intifada is ultimately less connected with the labor market than its pre-Intifada counterpart. Fourth, there is a significant disparity in earnings between those who joined the guard industry during the Intifada and those who did so previously, in favor of the latter. Overall, the findings demonstrate, using one industry as an example, that adhering to one employer for lengthy periods of time, a behavior that reduces a person’s occupational mobility at the onset of h/her career, when the person is in h/her twenties’ is detrimental to a person’s earning trajectory and weaken h/her connection with the labor market.
