Your Money or Your Life: Changing Job Quality in OECD Countries

By Andrew E. Clark. Social Science Research Network, 2005

324 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Job quality may usefully be thought of as depending on both job values (how much workers care about different job outcomes) and the job outcomes themselves. Here, both cross-section and panel data are used to examine changes in job quality in OECD countries during the 1990s. Despite rising wages and falling hours of work, overall job satisfaction is either stable or declining. These movements are neither due to changes in the type of workers nor because of changes in their job values. Some pieces of evidence point to stress and hard work as being strong candidates for what has gone wrong with employees' jobs. We find evidence of increasing inequality in a number of job outcomes. Some groups of workers have done better than others: the young and the highly educated have been insulated against downward movements in job quality, and there is tentative evidence that trade unions may have protected their members against adverse job outcomes.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Health Professions, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c7f212594b13043623c52e3db83f5fb027f48ce2

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Citations in the corpus

Direct participation and the quality of work (2013, background): “The first emphasizes the primacy of employees’ own views on what matters to them in a job (Clark, 2005).”
Assessing the Incidence and Wage Effects of Overskilling in the Australian Labour Market (2009, methodology): “The pooling of cross-sectional panel data in such a manner has become standard in recent years (see Disney & Gosling, 1998; Jenkins & Osberg, 2003; Marzano, 2003; Clark, 2005).”
Work autonomy, work pressure, and job satisfaction: An analysis of European Union countries (2014, background): “As suggested in the literature (Clark, 2005; Rose, 2003), the deterioration of the quality of intrinsic aspects of work outweighed the beneficial effects on job satisfaction of other features of work.”
Rethinking the soft skills deficit blame game: Employers, skills withdrawal and the reporting of soft skills gaps (2016, background): “There were, however, elements of poor job quality in both hotels such as low pay, antisocial hours and intense work (Clark, 2005; Green et al., 2013).”
Income and Happiness Across Europe: Do Reference Values Matter? (2009, methodology): “9 Clark et al (2001) find that unemployment experience in the past three years reduces life satisfaction of the currently employed (i.e. unemployment ‘scars’ psychologically). However, they also find some evidence of habituation - people may get used to unemployment. According to Lucas et al. (2004)”
For better or for worse? An analysis of how flexible working practices influence employees' perceptions of job quality (2008, background): “Job quality has been central to the EU’s employment strategy in recent years and consequently has received much attention in policy and academic debates (see, for example, European Commission 2001, 2002; Rubery and Grimshaw 2001; Clark 2005; Handel 2005).”
Measuring Precarious Employment: A Proposal for Two Indicators of Precarious Employment Based on Set-Theory and Tested with Dutch Labor Market-Data (2013, unknown): “The relevance of this factor is indicated by studies that show some employees are in non-standard work by choice, whereas others are not (Clark 2005; Kalleberg 2008; Loughlin and Murray 2013).”
Occupational segregation and gender inequality in job quality: a multi-level approach (2014, methodology): “As such, it also reflects the growing research interest in the quality of employment (Clark, 2005; Esser and Olsen, 2011; Gallie, 2007a, 2007b; Munoz de Bustillo et al., 2011; Stier, 2012).”
National surveillance of psychosocial risk factors in the workplace: An international overview (2007, background): “A survey of seven OECD countries indicated that perceptions of job security fell from 1989 to 1997, and that, while job satisfaction either remained stable or showed a downwards trend, perceptions of hard work increased (Clark, 2005). More recent data from EU countries suggests that job security fro”
Is Any Job Better than No Job? Life Satisfaction and Re-employment (2010, methodology): “Regarding the subjective perception of job quality, we follow the approach by Leontaridi and Sloane (2001), Clark (2005) and a number of case studies carried out by psychologists (see review in McKee-Ryan et al. 2005 )w here job satisfaction scores are used as a proxy for job quality.”
Human resource management practices and workers' job satisfaction (2008, methodology): “There is mounting research into the weakness of the link between income and life satisfaction, as in the happiness studies of Layard (2003, 2006) and Clark (2005) showing that despite rising wages there are stagnant levels in job satisfaction.”
Work, Jobs and Well-Being Across the Millennium (2009, methodology): “7 Previous work on the first two Work Orientations modules of the ISSP (Clark, 2005 b ) had shown falling job satisfaction in OECD countries across the 1990s, and had suggested that hard work was partly behind this movement.”