What is a good job? Do I have a good job? Do you have a good job?
When people are first asked whether or not their job is a good one or a bad one, they tend to base the answer on whether or not it pays well.
Others take a more value-based approach and would say that their job is a good one or not based upon the traditional ‘worth’ of the job or some other individualised assessment of how good, or not, they consider their job.
Others would define their job as good or not based upon the level of personal fulfilment or job satisfaction which they get. Unfortunately, however, these sorts of subjective assessments of job quality are of limited value.
What one individual considers a good job might not align with another person's assessment. This is because different individuals may have different criteria for their assessment of what constitutes a ‘good job’, and this makes it challenging to compare assessments across individuals or groups. What’s more subjective assessments of one’s job are influenced by individual biases, reference points, preferences, and circumstances.
To put it prosaically, a bad job may be willingly accepted by the people who work them, and they may even report high levels of job satisfaction. What’s more they may even be more likely to report being satisfied if they believe any alternatives are of poorer quality. That is because people judge their satisfaction not only by the absolute quality of what they have but also by how it compares to what they have previously had, what others around them have, or what other options are available.
On pay - while good pay is obviously a very important attribute of a good job, it is only one aspect. For example, even if a worker receives a high salary, excessive workload or interpersonal conflicts, or insecurity, may still lead to high levels of stress or leave one too exhausted to deal with care responsibilities at the end of the working day.
We all know that when we sit down to talk to our friends or our family – or when we reflect ourselves – that the quality of our jobs or whether or not we have a good job or a bad or even an ‘alright’ job is much more complicated and multifaceted than our pay or our subjective assessment of our job. We cannot tell whether a call centre job is a good job, or a bad job based upon pay alone. Similarly, we cannot assume the old norm that a doctor or a solicitor has a good job – or that a care worker has a good job because they get such strong levels of personal fulfilment from it.
Conceiving of and measuring job quality is not simply a matter of enquiring of people whether they are satisfied with their job, or whether their job preferences are being met or at what level they are paid. It is much more multifaceted than that.
And so, to answer the question of whether or not I have a good job, or you have a good job or if a doctor or a nurse or an engineer or a plumber or a builder has a good job, we need to evaluate our jobs against an objective set of criteria that we consider important for understanding job quality.
Numerous different conceptual frameworks have been developed to assess job quality and so we should obviously look to these for guidance. In the end, the task here is to just put a flag in the sand which establishes the position of the attributes of a job that are important to assess its quality.
Helpfully, while there are variations across the different conceptual frameworks there are a lot of agreement and crossover. Broadly speaking there is agreement that to assess job quality one needs to capture both ‘traditional’ economic or extrinsic job attributes and other non-economic indicators or ‘intrinsic’ attributes of a job. Extrinsic attributes include things like pay levels, contract status, and working hours. Intrinsic attributes include things like flexibility, intensity of work, job security, prospects and training, employee voice and representation, and relationships with other staff and management. Survey research can then be used to capture the quality of jobs based on the framework and provide a benchmark from which to measure.
By now you are thinking – but still, what is a good job?
The majority of jobs combine both negative and positive characteristics. It is the combination and interaction of the bad and the good that determines how good or not your job is. A good job has more of the good, a bad job has more of the bad, the rest have a combination of good and bad. The measurement task – as opposed to the conceptual requirement – is to reveal the variable ways in which good and not so good job characteristics combine, on balance. Then we need to decide how many good things or what combination of good things a worker has to have before we could reasonably say that they have a good job.
Conceptualising good jobs in terms of this dynamic interaction of both demands and resources demonstrates the need to go beyond a simplistic binary classification and instead to adopt an approach that considers jobs or indeed occupations as occupying a particular position on a spectrum or a ladder.
Thought of in this way, it also helps us to think much more holistically about the policy goal of increasing the proportion of working-age people in good jobs.
Some jobs are much more likely to be high-quality ‘good’ jobs and of course we should seek to grow the pot of these types of jobs as we create new jobs. This is likely to involve the pursuit of job growth in particular productive industries and sectors of our economy.
However, we need to also concentrate on our existing lot and the potential to grow the number of good jobs from this pot. To do this policy needs to focus on moving more and more jobs in the right direction along the ‘quality’ spectrum. This requires an in-depth knowledge of the quality of existing jobs and for policy then to target focus on the areas of deficit in order to push these jobs up the ladder to be good jobs.
This Blog was originally published as an Opinion Piece in the Belfast Telegraph on 9th April 2024.