Gardner, Jonathan and Oswald, Andrew J. (2001) What has been happening to the quality of workers' lives in Britain? Working Paper. Coventry: University of Warwick, Department of Economics. (Warwick economic research papers).

Preview

PDF WRAP_Gardner_twerp617.pdf - Requires a PDF viewer such as GSview, Xpdf or Adobe Acrobat Reader Download (215Kb)

Abstract

This paper studies workers’ lives in modern Britain. It uses longitudinal data to examine stress and job satisfaction through the decade of the 1990s. The results are disturbing. On both measures, the wellbeing of British public sector workers worsened sharply over the decade. The size of the deterioration was between one half point and one full point on a standard GHQ mental stress scale. This is remarkably large. Stress levels among private sector employees also rose. Job satisfaction in the private sector ran approximately flat through time. These findings may be of interest to nations who are thinking of adopting the British government’s policies towards the public sector, and to those who have conjectured that working life is becoming more pressurised.

Item Type:	Working or Discussion Paper (Working Paper)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor
Divisions:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Economics
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Employees -- Great Britain, Quality of life -- Great Britain, Job satisfaction -- Great Britain, Job stress -- Great Britain, Mental health -- Great Britain
Series Name:	Warwick economic research papers
Publisher:	University of Warwick, Department of Economics
Place of Publication:	Coventry
Date:	October 2001
Number:	No.617
Number of Pages:	37
Status:	Not Peer Reviewed
Access rights to Published version:	Open Access
Funder:	Economic and Social Research Council (Great Britain) (ESRC), Leverhulme Trust (LT), Nuffield Foundation (NF)
References:	Blackaby, D. H., Murphy, P. D., and N. C. O'Leary. "The payment of public sector workers in the UK: Reconciliation with North American findings." Economic Letters 65 (1999): 239-243. Blanchflower, D. G., and A. J. Oswald. "Well-being over time in Britain and the USA", working paper, NBER working paper, 2000. Bowling, A. Measuring Health: A Review of Quality of Life Scales. 2nd ed. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 1997. Clark, A. E., and A. J. Oswald. "Unhappiness and unemployment." Economic Journal 104 (1994): 648-659. Disney, R., and A. Gosling. "Does it pay to work in the public sector?" Fiscal Studies 19 (1998): 347-374. Disney, R., Gosling, A., and S. Machin. "What has happened to union recognition in Britain?" Economica 63 (1996): 1-18. Easterlin, R. A. "Does economic growth improve the human lot? Some empirical evidence." In Nations and Households in Economic Growth: Essays in Honour of Moses Abramowitz, edited by P.A. Reder and M.W. David. New York and London: Academic Press, 1974. Easterlin, R.A. "Income and happiness: Towards a unified theory" Economic Journal 111 (2001): 465-484. Elliot, R. F., and K. Duffus. "What has been happening to pay in the public-service sector of the British economy? Developments over the period 1970-1992." British Journal of Industrial Relations 34 (1996): 51-85. Freeman, R. B. "Job satisfaction as an economic variable." American Economic Review 68 (1978): 125-141. Frey, B. S. and A. Stutzer. Happiness and Economics. Princeton, USA: Princeton University Press, forthcoming, 2001. Greene, W. Econometric Analysis. 4th ed. London: Prentice-Hall, 2000. Gregory, R. G., and J. Borland. "Recent developments in public sector labor markets." Handbook of Labor Economics. edited by O. Ashenfelter and D. Card, 3573-630. Vol. 3C. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 1999. Hamermesh, D. S. "Economic aspects of job satisfaction." In Essays in Labor Market Analysis, edited by O. Ashenfelter and W. Oates. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1977. ———. "The changing distribution of job satisfaction." Journal of Human Resources 36 (2001): 1-30. Helliwell, J.F. "How is life? ", mimeo, Department of Economics, University of British Columbia and Oxford University, April, 2001. Kahneman, D., Wakker, P. P., and R. Sarin. "Back to Bentham? Explorations of experienced utility." Quarterly Journal of Economics 112 (1997): 375-406. Kapur, N., Borrill, S., and C. Stride. "Psychological morbidity and job satisfaction in hospital consultants and junior house officers: multi-centre, cross sectional survey." British Medical Journal 317 (1998): 511-512. Labour Market Trends. London: Office for National Statistics, 2000. Layard, R. "Human satisfactions and public policy." Economic Journal 90 (1980): 737-750. Machin, S. "Editorial: Will the NHS pay awards help recruitment." British Medical Journal 318 (1999): 958. McKelvey, W., and R. Zavoina. "A statistical model for the analysis of ordinal-level dependent variables." Journal of Mathematical Sociology 4 (1975): 103-120. Nathan, G. "A review of sample attrition and representativeness in three longitudinal surveys", Office for National Statistics, London, 1999. Oswald, A. J. "Happiness and economic performance." Economic Journal 107 (1997): 1818-1831. Ravallion, M and Lokshin, M. "Identifying welfare effects from subjective questions." Economica 68 (2001): 335-357. Warr, P. B. "Well-being and the workplace." In Well-being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology,edited by D. Kahneman, E. Diener, and N. Schwarz, 392-412. New York: Russel Sage, 1999. West, M. A., Smith, H., Feng, W., and R. Lawthom. "Research excellence and departmental climate in British Universities", working paper, Institute of Work Psychology, University of Sheffield, 1998.
URI:	http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/1571

Request changes to a record

Actions (login required)

View Item