Reference no: EM133293566

Employment Quality: An Overlooked Determinant of Workers' Health and Well-being?

In the past four decades, high-income countries have seen a thorough socio-economic restructuring with important implications for the jobs of many workers. Although many typical industrial risks have remained present on our labour markets, 'new risks' have gained importance. Importantly, these emerging risks are unevenly distributed across social groups (e.g. gender, occupations), with substantial inequalities in the allocation of favourable and adverse job characteristics. As a consequence, work remains an important social determinant of health and mortality.

Job quality researchers have tried to impose structure to the sheer endless list of work-related risks and benefits. They make a basic division between two dimensions: 'work-task intrinsic characteristics' (e.g. interesting, varied, autonomous, physically or psychologically demanding, ... work) and the 'conditions and relations of employment' (e.g. pay, benefits, social protection, working hours, training opportunities, formal and informal relations with management) (Warhurst et al., 2017). Through the strong development of research on physical, chemical, and psychosocial work characteristics, intrinsic work hazards have received most of the scholarly and policy attention.

The way employment is organized has also experienced profound changes-involving a variety of so-called non-standard employment arrangements. Nevertheless, contemporary conditions and relations of employment receive far less attention as OHS risk factors. This relative neglect is unjustified given the disrupting nature of many forms of non-standard employment.

In this commentary, I introduce the concept of 'employment quality' as a novel approach to measure employment-related OHS risks. The lack of attention to 'employment conditions and relations' in OHS research can be related to the conceptual shortcomings of the two currently dominant approaches. The first, 'pragmatic approach', studies specific types of non-standard employment statuses (e.g. fixed-term contracts) or specific isolated risk factors (e.g. flexible work schedules) (Benach et al., 2014). This approach had the merit of putting employment quality on the OHS agenda, but largely failed to demonstrate an overall picture of the OHS impact of new forms of employment. Importantly, the pragmatic approach lacks a clear conceptual framework that is able to account for the complexity of contemporary labour markets. A second approach resorts to workers' perceptions of job insecurity and broader fear of losing valued job characteristics (De Witte et al., 2016). This approach has been able to demonstrate powerful associations with workers' (mental) health and well-being but has the disadvantage of conflating situational factors with workers' individual preferences and personality characteristics (Benach et al., 2014).

The concept of 'employment quality' that I propose aims to transcend the before-mentioned problems by introducing a theory-based multi-dimensional approach. Its point of departure is the notion of the 'standard employment relationship' (SER) that took shape immediately after the Second World War (Lipietz, 1997). The SER-model-although its extent of generalization over post-war labour markets remains questionable-left a strong mental image of what a 'standard job' should look like. Full-time, careerlong employment, during daytime and embedded in an institutionalized system of industrial relations became a norm for 'good employment' (Standing, 2011). Therefore, the SER-model serves as a point of reference for assessing 'non-standard' employment arrangements. In line with the SER model, employment quality refers to seven 'objective' characteristics of employment that might or might not deviate from the SER model: (i) stability of employment, (ii) pay and benefits, (iii) social protection (social rights and benefits), (iv) working times, (v) training and employability opportunities, (vi) (collective) voice, and (vii) interpersonal power relations with superiors. Specific jobs can thus resemble the SER model to various extends. Moreover, patterns of combinations are not coincidental but assumed to reflect the structure of the segmented labour market.