To link observed job mobility to the life chances of workers, this talk develops the notion of job mobility zone to describe the underlying labour market structure. Characterising jobs by occupations within industries, this talk models individual workers’ positions in the labour market revealed by their job mobility and discerns job mobility zones that facilitate or constrain how workers move between jobs.

The talk uses an inferential random graph model to analyse data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation 2013-2016. It finds a 3-dimension network space where individual workers are positioned, and these positions are optimally clustered in twelve job mobility zones where workers have greater probabilities of job mobility within than between zones. In this sense, job mobility zones protect some workers to move among good jobs while trapping others to move among bad jobs, and thus determine workers’ life chances such as wages, health insurance, and job precarity.