Fernando Esteve

Measuring More than Money

Job quality is a crucial link between the economy and well-being. This original book proves that it can and should be measured, proposing a theoretically based multidimensional ‘Index of Job Quality’ that is tested in the EU member States. The index proves particularly useful to measure the differences in job quality by country, occupation, gender and age.

The Construction of a European Job Quality Index

1. The index should be based on a clear defi nition of job quality, and the elements included in the index should not go beyond the boundaries of such concept. We use the operational defi nition proposed earlier (see Chapter 1): job quality refers to the characteristics of jobs that have a direct impact on the wellbeing of workers. Such broad defi nition restricts considerably the type of information that a multidimensional job quality index should summarize: it should be restricted to information about the attributes of jobs, not of the workers that hold them (even if the information is reported by the workers themselves); it should not include contextual information (on institutional settings, unemployment levels, etc); and it should refer to results rather than procedures (unless such procedures have themselves a direct impact on the wellbeing of workers). 2. The selection of attributes to be measured, and the principles used for aggregating the information, should be based on a properly justifi ed theoretical model. For this purpose, we draw from the literature review carried out in Chapter 2: our model of job quality has fi ve dimensions that broadly correspond to the fi ve main traditions of study of job quality (or the impact of job attributes on the wellbeing of workers) in the Social Sciences. There is only one broad area of job quality reviewed in the previous chapter but not included in the model (because unfortunately the EWCS does not cover it): participation and industrial democracy.1 3. The index should be calculated at the individual level in order to allow analysing the situation of specifi c groups of workers. The data used should be highly harmonized across countries to make the results