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August 2017
Kirsten Sehnbruch, University Diego Portales
This article summarizes the findings from the academic paper “Job Quality in
the European Employment Strategy: One Step forward, two Steps back?” in
terms of results, policy implications and recommendations for the quality of
employment within the European Union.
There have been a plethora of institutional efforts within the European Union (EU) in order to raise the profile of employment policy, ever since the Lisbon Strategy in 2000 to the International Labour Organization (ILO) with its concept of „Decent Work‟. Accordingly, the academic literature has argued that it is the quality, not just the quantity of jobs that determines to which extent employment will solve, for instance, social exclusion or poverty. Despite these institutional and academic attempts, the quality of jobs remains a contested concept which has not sufficiently penetrated policymaking at the EU level.
To study this, our paper, reviews institutional perspectives of job quality in the context of the current policy debate within the EU with the objective of explaining why the issue remains on the political backburner. We undertake an extensive document analysis of EU publications and policy debates. As a complement to this analysis, we also review progress made by other international organisations, specifically the ILO and OECD, as their approaches and EU policy debates have been mutually influential.
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We also contribute to this debate by proposing a conceptual framework that defines different levels of analysis which can be applied to job quality. The objective is to introduce much needed accuracy and simplicity into current EU policy debates, and by doing so help clarify which dimensions should be included in a conceptual definition of job quality. We argue that placing concerns about job quality high on the policy agenda has a much better chance of success if a conceptually coherent and relevant definition can be operationalized in a manner suitable for cross-national comparisons at the EU level. We conclude by arguing that conceptual clarity and practical operationalization are vital pre-requisites for including job quality in any employment strategy that the EU may put forward in the future. Our arguments are based on the fact that for EU policy purposes, the concept of job quality must be defined and measured in an unequivocal manner that clearly indicates the desired direction of change and the policy steps necessary to achieve it. Only then the European Commission and Council will be able to use this as a basis for formulating employment guidelines for Member States, who in turn use these to formulate their National Action Plans for Employment.
From the review of EU documents and policy debates, including those from the ILO and OECD, we can conclude that three interlinked reasons interfere with progress on the issue of job quality, two are political and one is conceptual. First, the different labour market realities of the EU‟s Member States lead to different perspectives on whether governments should prioritise the flexibilization of labour markets, or whether they should secure high levels of job quality. Second, the rivalling interests of the EU‟s social partners also prioritise different labour market aspects, such as economic productivity and regulatory flexibility, or union rights, or fiscal sustainability depending on their point of view. Third, the conceptual confusion generated by definitions of employment quality that encompass too many variables from different perspectives of the labour market also complicates matters. Between them, these three complex problems generate a highly problematic vicious circle: to inform political debates appropriately we need evidence on the respective outcomes of policies that further job quality. Yet without a precise conceptualisation and definition of what we mean by „job quality‟, we cannot inform this debate. Furthermore, without such a definition, the EU cannot propose specific guidelines for a more integrated European Employment Strategy (EES) that takes job quality into account, and accords the issue the importance we think it deserves. The following section of this paper therefore proposes a framework that will help establish greater conceptual clarity when it comes to the issue of „job quality‟.
The analysis of the academic literature reveals the extent to which multiple and relatively diffuse job quality concepts have developed in parallel. The theoretical inconsistencies found reflect the complexity of a multi-dimensional concept that can be analysed from many, often rivalling, political or ideological perspectives. Specifically, these multiple perspectives tend to mix characteristics of individual workers, with those of the jobs themselves, the regulatory environment, welfare provisions or the labour market environment in a single conceptual definition. Such approaches not only require internationally comparable data that at present do not exist, but also preclude the measurement of job characteristics at the level of the individual worker, which also limits their comparability across groups of workers, countries and over time. They also hinder the formulation of concrete policy measures as the scope of interest is simply too broad and may even generate conflicting recommendations. Therefore, one of the unresolved issues in the literature on job quality involves deciding which variables should be part of a measurable conceptual definition.
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Based on our findings from the institutional efforts and academic literature, we illustrate how job quality can be defined in a more conceptually coherent manner. For this purpose, we develop a simple but useful framework for its analysis (Table 1).We distinguish between five different levels of analysis, and provide examples of the kind of variables that would fall into each category.
Table 1: Levels of Analysis in the Measurement of Job Quality
Levels of analysis Examples of measurements
Workers Age, child labour, forced labour, gender, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, level of education, skills, job satisfaction.
Jobs Wages, employment contracts and job security, working time arrangements, work intensity, health and safety issues, accident rates, conditions related to the work environment, worker autonomy.
Structural features of the labour market
Unemployment, employment, participation and inactivity levels, transition rates between labour market statuses or employment contracts, vacancy rates, unionisation rates, levels of inequality, macroeconomic environment. Legal framework Dismissal and employment protection legislation, antidiscrimination and
equal opportunity legislation, regulation relating to unionisation and collective bargaining rights.
Welfare policy Pensions, unemployment and health insurance, active labour market policies, childcare services.
Our article has considered reasons for the lack of effective progress observed thus far in the development of job quality indicators capable of guiding European social and employment policies. We examined how different levels of measurement in schemes of job quality have been mixed together to contribute to methodological, conceptual and theoretical confusion about what job quality actually is and from whose perspective it should be considered. We argue that to integrate job quality analysis better into a comparative social policy framework, it is necessary to define and consider carefully what the relevant dimensions of job quality are, on which level the analysis should focus and ensure that these choices are consistently applied in the analysis and cross-national comparisons. In addition, we argue that history has taught us that successful indicators which have a significant impact on policy makers must not be too complex, both in terms of their methodology and the quantity of variables included (Ward, 2004). Of the institutional efforts described above that have attempted to define job quality, the OECD‟s is the only one that is both relatively simple, and conceptually well defined in that it does not mix up different analytical levels in its framework for analysis. Such conceptual clarity and practical operationalization are vital pre-requisites for including job quality in any employment strategy that the EU may put forward in the future. In addition, for EU policy purposes, the concept of job quality must be defined and measured as this is the pre-requisite for the European Union Council to establish employment guidelines and for Member States to write their own national action plans.
Thus, our recommendations based on the original article‟s findings include: Conceptual clarity in defining the object of study is needed.
Defining boundaries that delineate what job quality is (and what it is not), as well as from whose perspective it should be considered is essential.
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Initiatives to measure job quality must originate directly from within EU policymaking bodies in order to have a much greater chance of guiding common policy formulations.
Only with advances on these fronts will we be able to focus necessary attention on the improvement of people's working lives that could parallel the attention that the human development indicators have generalized.
The purpose of this article is to understand how the concept of job quality has been brought about within the European Union and the academic literature, as well as to propose a policy oriented framework for the comparative measurement of job quality. Methodologically, the paper is based on an extensive review of both academic literature and institutional documentation, especially of those EU documents which allow us to trace the policy process related to job quality over time. In addition, we undertook approximately 26 interviews, meetings and conversations with high ranking policy experts in international institutions between 2001 and 2016. 13 of these were with senior ILO (in Geneva and three regional offices), nine senior European Union officials, while the remainder were undertaken with experts from other international institutions, such as the OECD, the United Nations Development Programme and the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean.
Burchell, B., Sehnbruch, K., Pians, A., & Agloni, N. (2015). Human Development and Decent Work: Why some Concepts succeed and others fail to impact the Development Agenda. Development and Change, 46, 197-224.
Burchell, B., Sehnbruch, K., Piasna, A., & Agloni, N. (2013). The quality of employment and decent work: definitions, methodologies, and ongoing debates. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 1-19.
Ramos, J., Sehnbruch, K., & Weller, J. (2015). The Quality of Employment in the Latin American Development Literature: Theory and Evidence. The International Labour Review(227-252), 154.
Sehnbruch, K. (2017). Job quality: conceptual and methodological challenges for comparative analysis. En D. Grimshaw, C. Fagan, G. Hebson, & I. Tavora, Making Work more Equal: A New Labour Market Segmentation Approach. Manchester: University of Manchester Press. Sehnbruch, K., & Ocampo, J. A. (2015). The Quality of Employment in the Development Literature.
The International Labour Review, 154(167-170).
RESEARCH PARAMETERS
P a g e 5 PROJECT NAME NOPOOR – Enhancing Knowledge for Renewed Policies against Poverty COORDINATOR Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, Paris, France
CONSORTIUM CDD The Ghana Center for Democratic Development – Accra, Ghana CDE Centre for Development Economics – Delhi, India
CNRS (India Unit) Centre de Sciences Humaines – New Delhi, India
CRES Consortium pour la Recherche Èconomique et Sociale – Dakar, Senegal GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies – Hamburg, Germany GRADE Grupo de Análisis para el Desarrollo – Lima, Peru
IfW Kiel Institute for the World Economy – Kiel, Germany IRD Institut de Recherche pour le Développement – Paris, France
ITESM Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey – Monterrey, Mexico LISER Luxemburg Institute of Socio-Economic Research – Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxemburg OIKODROM - The Vienna Institute for Urban Sustainability – Vienna, Austria
UA-CEE Université d‟Antananarivo – Antananarivo, Madagascar UAM Universidad Autónoma de Madrid – Madrid, Spain UCHILE Universidad de Chile – Santiago de Chile, Chile
UCT–SALDRU University of Cape Town – Cape Town, South Africa UFRJ Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro – Rio de Janeiro, Brazil UNAMUR Université de Namur – Namur, Belgium
UOXF-CSAE University of Oxford, Centre for the Study of African Economies – Oxford, United Kingdom
VASS Vietnamese Academy of Social Sciences – Hanoi, Vietnam
FUNDING SCHEME FP7 Framework Programme for Research of the European Union –SSH.2011.4.1-1: Tackling poverty in a development context, Collaborative project/Specific International Cooperation Action. Grant Agreement No. 290752
DURATION April 2012 – September 2017 (66 months) BUDGET EU contribution: 8 000 000 €
WEBSITE http://www.nopoor.eu/ FOR MORE
INFORMATION Xavier Oudin, Scientific coordinator, IRD-DIAL, Paris, France, Delia Visan, Manager, IRD-DIAL, Paris, France delia.visan@ird.fr oudin@dial.prd.fr Tel: +33 1 53 24 14 66 Contact email address: info@nopoor.eu
EDITORIAL TEAM
Edgar Aragon, Laura Valadez (ITESM) Heidi Dumreicher (OIKODROM) Xavier Oudin (IRD-DIAL)
The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the European Commission.
