Your Money or Your Life: Changing Job Quality in OECD Countries
| Author | Andrew E. Clark |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.2005.00361.x |
| Published date | 01 September 2005 |
| Date | 01 September 2005 |
British Journal of Industrial Relations
43:3 September 2005 0007– 1080 pp. 377– 400
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2005. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
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Blackwell Publishing Ltd.Oxford, UKBJIRBritish Journal of Industrial Relations0007-1080Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2005September 2005433377400Articles
Changing Job QualityBritish Journal of Industrial Relations
Andrew E. Clark is at Paris-Jourdan Sciences Economiques (PSE), Ecole normale supérieure,
Paris, France, and at the Institut zur Zukunft der Arbeit, Bonn, Germany.
Your Money or Your Life: Changing Job
Quality in OECD Countries
Andrew E. Clark
Abstract
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 them-
selves. 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.
1. Introduction
In terms of labour market outcomes, the 1980s might be thought of as the
decade of unemployment. The 1990s saw a return to healthier labour markets
(at least in Anglo-Saxon countries). However, while jobs were indeed being
created, there was concern about their nature: were the good jobs of the 1960s
and 1970s being replaced by bad jobs in the 1990s? To paraphrase, are we
facing a phenomenon of good job-less growth?
This paper asks whether such worries are warranted. On the face of it, it
seemed that there might not have been much cause for disquiet. Many anal-
yses of the changing nature of jobs restrict themselves to purely monetary
criteria; and in this respect, developments were reasonably positive in
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) coun-
tries. Real wages for full-time workers increased in most countries between
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British Journal of Industrial Relations
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2005.
the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, although many countries also experienced
a widening of the wage distribution, especially for men (the growth of the
top-earnings decile being larger than that for the first-earnings decile,
although both were typically positive). One exception to this general move-
ment was the USA. Here, overall real-wage growth was only small, and the
real wages of men in not only the bottom but also the fifth decile fell between
1985 and 1995 (see Chart 3.3 of OECD 1996).
Some articles have also made reference to hours of work when discussing
job quality. Here, there is an obvious secular trend downwards in OECD
countries (see OECD 1998). From the early 1980s onwards, hours of work
have fallen in some countries (e.g. Japan, Spain, Germany and France) and
remained stable in others (e.g. Canada and the UK). In only two OECD
countries have hours of work increased over the period in question: Sweden
(from a low level) and the USA.
1
The third aspect is job security. The conclusions here are less clear. The
analysis in OECD (1997) showed in many countries (including the USA), no
sharp movement in retention rates (the percentage of workers in a job at time
t
who are still in the same job five years later) between the early 1980s and
the mid-1990s. A more recent analysis of Germany, the UK and the USA
found no robust evidence of increasing job insecurity (Green 2003).
A simple summary of changes in job quality might then be that income
has largely risen and hours of work have largely fallen, while insecurity
presents no clear overwhelming trend: job quality has arguably risen. Here, I
suggest that concentration on income and hours of work may, in fact, give a
biased picture of what has been happening on the ground, i.e. to jobs as
experienced by workers themselves. There are many other important aspects
of jobs such as job content, autonomy and relations at work, and it is possible
that some of these have deteriorated over the 1990s. I therefore examine
changes over time in a number of elements of good jobs not as defined by an
outside observer but as reported by workers themselves. As in the theory of
compensating differentials, the seemingly free lunch of higher pay and less
hours of work might have to be paid for via harder work. I use micro-data
from a number of OECD countries to look for evidence of a paid lunch: any
such trade-off will render the simple summary above untrustworthy.
2. Cross-section and panel data on job quality
Two data sets are used to examine movements in various measures of job
quality over the 1990s. The first, multi-country and repeated cross section,
comes from the Work Orientations module of the International Social Survey
Programme (ISSP; http://www.issp.org). This module was run in 1989 and
1997; the third edition is scheduled in 2005. Seven OECD countries were
present in both waves: West Germany, Great Britain, the USA, Hungary, the
Netherlands, Italy and Norway. Keeping only full-time or part-time employ-
ees in these seven countries yields a sample of just under 11,000 observations
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