Conceiving, designing and trailing a short‐form measure of job quality: a proof‐of‐concept study

• Author: Alan Felstead,Duncan Gallie,Golo Henseke,Francis Green
• Published date: 01 January 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12241
• Date: 01 January 2019

Conceiving, designing and trailing a short-

form measure of job quality: a proof-of-

concept study

Alan Felstead,*Duncan Gallie, Francis Green and

Golo Henseke

ABSTRACT

The government has accepted the Taylor Review’s recommendation that it should re-

port annually on job quality in the UK. This article argues that three principles need

to be followed in choosing the right measures and shows how these principles have

been used to create a short job quality quiz (www.howgoodismyjob.com).

1 INTRODUCTION

It is commonly known and widely understood that some jobs are better than others.

However, it is less clear in what ways are they better or worse than others and on what

basis such ratings are made. Despite this lack of clarity, job quality—or the promo-

tion of what is sometimes referred to as good or fair work—is an idea high on the

agenda of politicians, policy makers and academics. For the last quarter of a century

or more, both the ILO’s and the EU’s employment strategies have been based on the

idea that having a job does not mean that workers’needs are automatically met be-

cause terms and conditions of jobs vary (ILO, 1999; European Commission, 2001).

Support for this position comes from research that suggests that jobs characterised,

for example, by high demands, low control over decision making and high levels of

job insecurity can be as bad for worker well-being as being out of work (Green

et al., 2016a; Chandola and Zhang, 2018, Financial Times, 23 August 2016). Interest

in how these terms and conditions of jobs vary—summed up in the phrase job quality

—has grown even further over the last few years. In 2015, for example, the G20—the

international forum of governments and central bankers from the 20 largest countries

—committed its members to ‘improving job quality along three dimensions, namely

promoting the quality of earnings, reducing labour market insecurity, and promoting

good working conditions and healthy workplaces’(G20, 2015: 2).

In the UK, job quality has also moved up the agenda. For example, the Labour

Party’s 2015 election manifesto stressed the importance of creating jobs that provide

‘better work, better pay and better skills’(Labour Party, 2015: 23). Similarly, in 2017,

the Labour Party’s goal, if elected, was to ‘make work more fulfilling by using public

❒Professor Alan Felstead, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK, Professor Duncan

Gallie, Nuffield College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK and Professor Francis Green and Dr Golo

Henseke, Institute of Education, University College London, UK. Correspondence should be addressed

to Alan Felstead, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK;

Email: alanfelstead@cf.ac.uk

Industrial Relations Journal 50:1, 2–19

ISSN 0019-8692

©2019 The Authors Industrial Relations Journal published by Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribu-

tion and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

investment to upgrade our economy and create high-quality jobs’(Labour Party,

2017: 46). With unemployment at rates not seen since the mid-1970s, the Conserva-

tive government has also shifted some of its focus onto the quality of jobs. The Prime

Minister, for example, commissioned the Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices

with the ambition of making all work in the UK ‘fair and decent with realistic scope

for development and fulfilment’(Taylor, 2017: 6). The Industrial Strategy announced

in 2017 went on to commit the government to create ‘more good jobs and better pay

…high quality jobs for all UK citizens’(HM Government, 2017: 29).

In the devolved administrations (as well as in some local authorities), interest in job

quality has also grown. In Wales, for example, the former First Minister announced

that he wanted ‘to make Wales a “fair work nation”…in which more people can have

access to good work and a secure income …[thereby creating] more and better jobs

closer to home’(First Minister’s Speech to the Welsh Labour Conference, Llandudno,

25 March 2017). In Scotland, the Fair Work Convention was established in 2015, and

fair work is a central part of the Scottish Government’s economic strategy of making

improvements to ‘income levels, work security, levels of autonomy and control’as well

as the ‘opportunities for personal and workplace development’(Scottish Government,

2015: 60). Moreover, its vision is that ‘by 2025, people in Scotland will have a world-

leading working life where fair work drives success, wellbeing and prosperity for indi-

viduals, businesses, organisations and society’(Fair Work Convention, 2016: 4).

However, despite policy interest in the field, it is not always clear in this discourse

what good or fair work actually means and how it can quickly and easily be mea-

sured. This is not helped by the lack of a widely agreed and commonly used short-

form instrument. This is perhaps surprising given that the study of job quality has a

long history with indicators suggested by the European Commission through its

agency the European Foundation for Living and Working Conditions, the OECD

and the United Nations (Eurofound, 2012; United Nations Economic Commission

for Europe, 2015; OECD, 2017).

Off-the-shelf short-form measures of other concepts such as personality types and

levels of affective well-being, however, have been developed, are widely used and have

become influential (Gosling et al., 2003; Warr, 1990). The Human Development In-

dex, for example, puts the spotlight on life expectancy at birth, the number of years

schooling and the average standard of living as constituting a summary measure of

a country’s development capability (Piasna et al., 2017; Sehnbruch et al., 2017). Yet

no such short-form measure of job quality currently exists, prompting the Taylor Re-

view of Modern Working Practices to argue that ‘more effort has to be placed on mea-

suring quality of work through agreed metrics and better data’(Taylor, 2017: 102).

This recommendation has been accepted by government, and it is seeking to select

‘the best measures to evaluate the level of good work’, which will then be used to ‘re-

port annually on the quality of work in the UK economy and hold ourselves to ac-

count’(HM Government, 2018: 13). By devising a short 5-minute job quality quiz,

which draws on tried-and-tested instruments used to collect data over the last 30 years

from around 29,000 workers in Britain, we offer a contribution to this debate.

The article is structured as follows. Section 2 critically examines the ways in which

job quality can be conceived and the three principles that underpin our approach.

These are as follows: putting the enhancement of workers’well-being centre stage, fo-

cusing on the features of the job and devising a set of multi-faceted measures.

Section 3 reviews previous approaches to the measurement of job quality and high-

lights where they are in line or out of step with these guiding principles. Section 4

3A short form measure of job quality

©2019 The Authors Industrial Relations Journal published by Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd