Economic recessions, the industrial shift from manufacturing toward service industries, and rising global
competition have contributed to declining optimism about job security, with potential consequences for
workers’ health. To address limitations of prior research on the health consequences of perceived job
insecurity, we use longitudinal data from two nationally-representative samples of the United States
population, and examine episodic and persistent perceived job insecurity over periods of about three years
to almost a decade. Results show that persistent perceived job insecurity is a significant and substantively
important predictor of poorer self-rated health in the American’s Changing Lives (ACL) and Midlife in
the United States (MIDUS) samples, and of depressive symptoms among ACL respondents. Job losses or
unemployment episodes are associated with perceived job insecurity, but do not account for its
association with health. Results are robust to controls for sociodemographic and job characteristics,
individual negative reporting style, and earlier health and health behaviors