Project Lead
Professor Francis Green
Team Members
Duncan Gallie
Anna Vignoles
Golo Henseke
Description
The study of job quality has progressed a long way in recent decades. Job quality refers to a range of job characteristics that contribute to satisfying workers’ human needs from work. Alongside wages (which are vital for our material needs), job quality also embraces a job’s prospects for the future, its intrinsic aspects, and the quality of work time. There is ongoing policy and academic interest in the factors that determine the quality of jobs that people attain. Not least, policy-makers hold that good quality jobs are needed to support high employment rates, including raising the retirement age. There are relevant factors both on the demand side (the characteristics of jobs and employers), and on the supply side (individuals’ prior acquisition of human capital).
The study of job quality has progressed a long way in recent decades. Job quality refers to a range of job characteristics that contribute to satisfying workers’ human needs from work. Alongside wages (which are vital for our material needs), job quality also embraces a job’s prospects for the future, its intrinsic aspects, and the quality of work time. There is ongoing policy and academic interest in the factors that determine the quality of jobs that people attain. Not least, policy-makers hold that good quality jobs are needed to support high employment rates, including raising the retirement age. There are relevant factors both on the demand side (the characteristics of jobs and employers), and on the supply side (individuals’ prior acquisition of human capital).
The objective of this project has been to examine the factors, both demand- and supply-side, that channel some people into good jobs, and others into bad ones. It has involved several studies, using nationally representative survey data. Some of our studies have used the Skills and Employment Survey 2012, which is connected to this theme and attached to this project as well as to project 2.4. Topics covered in our earlier work in 2013 and 2014 included: job quality through the economic crisis, participation, job-related well-being, insecurity and training. Since 2015 we have built on this work and taken advantage of supplementary funding from the UK Commission for Employment and Skills to conduct further in-depth research on job quality, focusing on studies of graduate jobs, of overeducation and of job quality across different work spaces.
Researchers’ understanding of the determinants of job quality comes largely from studies using cross-sectional data, in series such as the Skills and Employment Surveys or the European Working Conditions Surveys. Longitudinal data, however, offer a better prospect of being able to confidently draw conclusions about causal processes. To make progress, therefore, we have used the British Cohort Study of people born in 1970, and we have also conducted a follow-up survey of participants in the 2012 Skills and Employment Survey two years later in 2014. With the resulting new longitudinal data set we have studied factors that caused changes in job quality for individual workers between 2012 and 2014. Among other factors, we have so far especially focused on skill use, work effort and organisational participation. We also find evidence for long-term effects from private schooling on job quality.
This project involved the development and analysis of the 2012 Skills and Employment Survey, its extension to a second wave in 2014, and later the development and first analyses of the 2017 Skills and Employment Survey. Some of this analysis was funded directly within LLAKES core grant, other parts through extensions and additional grants, in collaboration with Cardiff University. Among the many findings are:
1. The project developed an index of ‘graduate jobs’, using a statistical classification procedure. Applied to the period between 1997/2001 and 2006/2012, the research finds that the proportion of graduate jobs grew to 40 percent and the pay returns for graduates in graduate jobs was maintained. However, the penalty for graduates who are mismatched increased substantially.
2. Contrary to critical literature, even after controlling for unobserved individual heterogeneity, all forms of direct participation work have positive effects for employees’ organisational commitment and well‐being.
3. Privately educated workers are in jobs that require significantly greater leadership skills, offer greater organisational participation and require greater work intensity. These associations are partially mediated by educational achievement. Collectively these factors contribute little, however, to explaining the direct pay premium received by the privately educated. Rather, a more promising account arises from the finding that inclusion of a variable for industry reduces the premium to an insignificant amount, which is consistent with selective sorting of privately educated workers into high-paying industries.
4. There needs to be a more comprehensive concept of job insecurity, including not only job tenure insecurity but also job status insecurity, relating to anxiety about changes to valued features of the job. Job status insecurity is highly prevalent in the workforce and is associated with different individual, employment and labour market characteristics than those that affect insecurity about job loss. Effective mechanisms of employee participation can reduce both types of job insecurity.
5. To obtain a picture of the trend in training volume, we synthesized a narrative through a new analysis of multiple surveys. The duration of training fell sharply with the result that the training volume per worker declined by about a half between 1997 and 2012. This fall is hard to reconcile with optimistic rhetoric surrounding the knowledge economy. We conclude with recommendations to improve the collection of training statistics.
6. Job-related well-being was stable between 2001 and 2006, but then declined between 2006 and 2012. In modelling the determinants of job-related well-being, our research finds that downsizing, work re-organisation, decreased choice, and linking pay to organisational performance each reduce well-being; indicators of skills challenge in jobs have more of a positive association with Enthusiasm than with Contentment, while effort has a more negative association with Contentment than with Enthusiasm.
Impact
The Skills and Employment Survey is widely used in national and international contexts, and has been disseminated through engagement with policy advisers and multiple launch events, press coverage and research briefs. For example, Professor Francis Green presented evidence on the graduate labour market over the long term in Britain, the decline in workplace training, and about skills mismatch (“The Future of Skills and Lifelong Learning”), which was used by the Government’s Go Foresight team in its project about skills trends. The UKCES review of the skills landscape by the UK Commission for Employment and Skills made frequent use of the SES results and associated data; the NHS Pay Review Body’s pay recommendations for 2014 cite project results and the Welsh Government’s policy on skills also refers to findings from the project. In 2015 the survey findings were used to frame public policy debates as the political parties launched their election manifestos. Evidence was used by the Smith Institute ‘Making Work Better’ Inquiry and the Skills Commission Inquiry into the Future of Work; evidence taken from the survey was also used in the Labour Party’s manifesto for work. The CIPD have also made use of the findings. A further, lasting legacy of the project is the data infrastructure which will permit further analyses to be carried out by academic or policy-based researchers on a variety of skills and job quality issues.
Expertise developed within LLAKES from the SES has also been used to advise the European Foundation for Living and Working Conditions; the Foundation adopted the indicators of job quality recommended by Professor Green in his report in 2013; and we have contributed to consultations with the OECD during the development of its approach to job quality measurement. The ‘Job Requirements Approach’ for measuring job tasks, developed by Professor Green, has been built into the questionnaire of the OECD’s Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competences (PIAAC). In addition, the 2012 SES questionnaire has been used (with moderate changes) by the Institute of Adult Learning in Singapore in two surveys: its Skills and Employment Survey and its Learning At Work survey (in 2017).
Selected publications
Journal Articles
Felstead, A., D. Gallie, F. Green and G. Henseke (2017 forthcoming). ‘Conceiving, Designing and Trailing A Short Form Measure of Job Quality: A Proof Of Concept Study’ Industrial Relations Journal.
Gallie, D., Y. Zhou, A. Felstead, F. Green and G. Henseke (2017). ‘The Implications of Direct Participation for Organisational Commitment, Job Satisfaction and Affective Psychological Well-being: a Longitudinal Analysis.’ Industrial Relations Journal, 48(2): 174-191.
Green, F., Henseke, G. and Vignoles, A. (2017) “Private Schooling and Labour Market Outcomes.’ British Educational Research Journal. 43 (1), 7-28.
Green, F. and G. Henseke (2016) ‘Should Governments of OECD Countries Worry about Graduate Underemployment?’ Oxford Review of Economic Policy.
Henseke, G (2017) ‘Good Jobs, Good Pay, Better Health? The Effects of Job Quality on Health among Older European Workers.’ The European Journal of Health Economics.
Green, F. and G. Henseke (2016). ‘The Changing Graduate Labour Market: Analysis Using a New Indicator of Graduate Jobs.’ IZA Journal of Labor Policy, 5:14.
Felstead, A., D. Gallie, F. Green and G. Henseke (2016 online). ‘The Determinants of Skills Use and Work Pressure: A Longitudinal Analysis.’ Economic and Industrial Democracy.
Gallie, D., A. Felstead, F. Green and H. Inanc (2016 online). “The Hidden Face of Job Insecurity.” Work, Employment and Society. http://wes.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/01/29/0950017015624399.full.pdf+html
Green, F., A. Felstead, D. Gallie and G. Henseke (2016). “Skills and Work Organisation in Britain: A Quarter Century of Change”. Journal for Labour Market Research. 49 (2), 121-132.
Green, F. (2015 online). ‘Health Effects of Insecurity”. IZA World of Labor 2015: 212.
Green, F., A. Felstead, D. Gallie, H. Inanc and N. Jewson (2016). ‘The Declining Volume of Workers’ Training in Britain. British Journal of Industrial Relations. 54 (2) pp. 422-448.
Felstead, A., D. Gallie, Green, F. and H. Inanc (2015). ‘Fits, Misfits and Interactions: Learning at Work, Job Satisfaction and Job-related Employee Well-being”. Human Resource Management Journal. 25: 3, 294–310.
Green, F., A. Felstead, D. Gallie and H. Inanc (2016). ‘Job-Related Well-Being Through the Great Recession.” Journal of Happiness Studies. 17(1), 389-411.
Inanc, H., Y. Zhou, A. Felstead, D. Gallie and F. Green (2015). ‘Direct Participation and Employee Learning at Work.’ Work and Occupations. 42 (4) 447-475
Gallie, D, Felstead, A, Green, F and Inanc, H, (2014) ‘The Quality of Work in Britain over the Economic Crisis’ International Review of Sociology—Revue Internationale de Sociologie, Vol. 24, No. 2, 1–18.
Green, F., T. Mostafa, A. Parent-Thirion, G. Vermeylen, G. V. Houten, I. Biletta and M. Lyly-Yrjanainen (2013). ‘Is Job Quality Becoming More Unequal?’ Industrial & Labor Relations Review, 66 (4), 753-84.
Papers in Edited Books
Felstead, A., F. Green, and D. Gallie (2016) ‘Measuring the Contours of Skills: Stock, Demand and Mismatch’ in Buchanan, J., D. Finegold, K. Mayhew and C. Warhurst (eds.) Oxford Handbook of Skills and Training, Oxford University Press.
Green, F. & Mason, G.(2015). ‘Skills and Training for a More Innovation-Intensive Economy.’ in D. Bailey, K. Cowling & P. Tomlinson (Eds.) New Perspectives on Industrial Policy for a Modern Britain. Oxford University Press.
Green, F., Felstead, A. & Gallie, D. (2015). ‘The Inequality of Job Quality in Britain.’ in F. Green, A. Felstead & D. Gallie (Eds.) Unequal Britain At Work. The Evolution and Distribution of Job Quality. Oxford University Press.
Bryson, A. & Green, F. (2015). ‘Unions and Job Quality.’ in F. Green, A. Felstead & D. Gallie (Eds.) Unequal Britain At Work. The Evolution and Distribution of Job Quality. Oxford University Press.
Felstead, A., Gallie, D. & Green, F. 2015. ‘Policies for Improving Job Quality.’ in F. Green, A. Felstead & D. Gallie (Eds.) Unequal Britain At Work. The Evolution and Distribution of Job Quality. Oxford University Press.
