Job quality in growing and declining economic sectors of the EU

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Abstract

A central aim of the European Employment Strategy since the Lisbon Treaty of 2000 has been to promote ̳more and better‘ jobs: a recognition that the nature of a job can have a profound impact on the well-being of employees and that employee well-being and productivity are linked. Creating more and better jobs has also been seen as a vehicle to promote a wider social agenda concerned with increasing the employment rates of groups that, historically, have had low levels of participation in the workforce particularly in high quality jobs.In terms of employment growth, the European Employment Strategy would appear to have been successful in increasing the total number of jobs and the employment rate, i.e., the percentage of the available workforce in employment. From 2000 to 2008, figures from the Labour Force Survey suggest that the number of jobs in the EU increased from 209.874 million to 226.552 million (an increase of 7.9%) and the employment rate increased from 63.2 to 64.6 percent. The increase in the number of jobs was, however, largely confined to the service sector. The proportion of service sector jobs rose from 65.9 to 70.4%, while the proportion of jobs in the agricultural sectors declined from 7.3 to 5.6% and, in the industrial sectors, it declined from 26.8 to 24%.Given that more jobs have been created, it is also important to know their quality. One way of addressing this issue is to examine job quality in growing sectors (e.g., services, construction) and in declining sectors (e.g., manufacturing, energy supply, agriculture). If jobs are being created in sectors where levels of job quality have traditionally been high, this might indicate that better jobs are being created. However, there has yet to be a general review of the published evidence on job quality in growing and declining sectors within the EU. Studies have reported on sectoral differences in job quality but have not discussed these differences with regard to growing and declining sectors. Furthermore, the evidence on sectoral differences in job quality is fragmented, as previous studies providing information on this topic have examined different aspects of job quality, measured job quality in different ways and used different data sources. It can also be observed that there has yet to be a detailed analysis using empirical data with a specific focus on job quality in growing and declining sectors within the EU.To provide a detailed review and analysis of job quality in new and growing sectors of the EU economy, it is therefore necessary to conduct a review of the current literature on job quality in Europe and also to conduct new analyses on this topic. As such, this report has three main aims. The first aim is to review the current literature for evidence of the nature and effects of job quality in growing and declining sectors within the EU. In particular, we seek to identify the level of job quality within growing and declining sectors and to compare the level of job quality between growing and declining sectors. The second aim is to examine how the level of job quality varies between growing sectors and sub-sectors of the economy in the European Union1 and Norway using the European Working1 To harmonize the results across other reports in the WALQING project we had to excluded Malta, Romania, and Bulgaria. The general pattern of results was not significantly affected by this exclusion.2Job Quality in Growing and Declining Economic Sectors of the EU / WALQINGConditions Survey data set from 2005. The third aim is to develop a taxonomy of job types in the European Union, to establish the job quality of these job types, and to then examine the distribution of job types in growing sectors of the European economy. Examining the distribution of job types in this way will help to provide a more nuanced understanding of the distribution of job quality in Europe.To meet these aims, the report has four parts. Part 1 discusses the concept of job quality and provides a definition that is used throughout the report. Parts 2, 3 and 4 address the first, second and third aims of the report respectively.

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