Drawing on nationally representative data for British employees, the article argues for 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. It shows that 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. It is also related to different organizational contexts. However, the article also shows that the existence of effective mechanisms of employee participation can reduce both types of job insecurity.
The negative impact of unemployment on individuals and its spillover to spouses is widely documented. However, we have a gap in our knowledge when it comes to the similar consequences of temporary employment. This is problematic, because although temporary jobs are often considered better alternatives to unemployment for endowing individuals with income and opportunities to connect to employers, they are also associated with stressors such as high levels of job insecurity and poor quality work, the effects of which might spill over to spouses. Using matched data from the British Household Panel Study, I show that temporary work is at least as detrimental as unemployment for spouses’ subjective well-being, although there are differences. When experienced by husbands, temporary work, like unemployment, has a negative effect on wives’ psychological well-being and life satisfaction. Yet, as opposed to unemployment, wives’ temporary employment also spills over and negatively affects husbands’ psychological well-being. Furthermore, coupled individuals’ well-being is most affected when men are either unemployed or temporarily employed and their wives have permanent jobs, suggesting that the effect is related to gender deviation. The effects are robust after controlling for fixed individual characteristics that can influence both employment status and well-being outcomes.
We study how job-related well-being (measured by Warr's 'Enthusiasm' and 'Contentment' scales) altered through the Great Recession, and how this is related to changing job quality. Using nationally representative data for Britain, we find that jobrelated well-being was stable between 2001 and 2006, but then declined between 2006 and 2012. We report relevant changes in job quality. In modelling the determinants of jobrelated well-being, we confirm several previously-studied hypotheses and present some new findings: 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. Our estimates are largely orthogonal to the effects of personality traits and demographic controls on wellbeing. Using a standard decomposition, we find that the 2006-2012 fall in job-related wellbeing is partly accounted for by accelerations in the pace of workplace change, rising job insecurity, increased effort and changing participation.Keywords Effort Á Job insecurity Á Downsizing Á Performance-related pay Á Organisational participation Á Job-related well-being Á Task discretion Á Skill IntroductionThis paper is concerned with what happens to the job-related well-being of those in employment in a major recession. Periods of economic crisis and stagnation are typically seen as occasions for accelerated changes in employment and production relations. Whether through Schumpeterian creative destruction or through a shift in the balance of power, the opportunity may be taken to renew working methods, relationships and pay bargains, with consequences for both employers and their employees. Major economic downturns are known to generate falls in general well-being (as manifested in overall life satisfaction and health indicators) which extend beyond those rendered involuntarily unemployed to the broader workforce who feel less secure and to their dependants (Burchell 1994;Di Tella et al. 2003;Green 2011). The focus here, however, is on how indicators of job-related wellbeing (feelings about one's job) are changed over a recession, and on how this is related to changing job quality. To investigate this, we examine the specific instance of employees in Britain before and after the 'Great Recession' of 2008-2009.Since job-related well-being is an end in itself, studying it needs no additional motivation. Nevertheless, there is evidence that job-related well-being is associated with productivity, absenteeism and labour turnover (e.g. De Neve et al. 2013;Warr 2007;Zelenski et al. 2008)-even if much remains to be done to determine the magnitude of the causal effects. In recent years well-being-including in the domain of work-has been assigned a place in the 'beyond GDP' agenda (Stiglitz et al. 2009). A better understanding of various dimensions of well-being at an aggregate level are re...
The creation of a learning environment at work has been seen as an essential concomitant of the growth of an advanced economy. This article explores the implications of direct participation for different types of employee learning, drawing upon the British Skills and Employment Surveys of 2006 and 2012. It confirms that direct participation is strongly associated with enhanced learning opportunities at work but finds important differences in the benefits of specific forms of direct participation. Moreover, direct participation was found to be particularly important for those in less favorable work contexts with respect to technological level and skill.
The conventional focus on the training participation rate, rather than training volume, in official statistics and research has obscured a radical transformation in workers' training in Britain. To obtain a picture of the trend in training volume, we synthesize 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. Potential explanations are discussed. We conclude with recommendations to improve the collection of training statistics.
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