Job quality and labour market performance

16 | Erhel & Guergoat-Larivière

Nace classification: C_TO_F Industry / G_TO_K Services (excluding public administration) / L Public
administration and defence; compulsory social security / M_TO_Q Other services / TOTAL All NACE
branches.

Source: LFS (2006 for NMS, 2007 for EU15), European Structure of Earnings Survey (2002).

In the EU15, part-time work is particularly developed in services compared to industry or public
administration. Comparatively, the temporary employment rate is rather equally spread out
across activities.

In terms of wages, public administration workers are better-off compared to other workers.
They earn about 25% more both in the EU15 countries and in the New Member States.

In conclusion, these comparisons, based on potential criteria of heterogeneity (gender, age,
education etc.), indicate the most fragile groups in terms of job quality; namely the groups of
people who accumulate bad job characteristics.

People with lower levels of education are most likely to be in low-quality jobs. They experience
low socio-economic security, have lower wages and greater instability of employment.
Moreover, they are also less likely to receive training and be able to move out of this
unfavourable situation.

On average, young people are also disadvantaged: they have low socio-economic security (low
wages, temporary contracts and part-time work) and endure more asocial working hours. On the
other hand, they have a greater chance of receiving training than older workers. However, this
group is likely to be quite heterogeneous in itself. It may include at least two different kinds of
people: those who suffer from low-quality jobs because they are young and unskilled and for
whom there is little probability of improvement; and those who have reached high levels of
education (or may not even have finished their studies) who experience lower-quality jobs
mainly because of their ‘youth’ (a combination of work and studies, or a lack of experience in
their first job) but who will move on from this situation later.

Women can also be considered as a disadvantaged group in terms of socio-economic security:
they receive lower wages and are more likely than men to work part-time involuntarily. This
situation might be related to conciliation issues that lead women to work part-time. However,
women seem to be in a somewhat better position than men as regards training and partly
regarding working conditions (night work).

These results have some limitations, however: they are based on aggregate data, and provide a
static approach to job quality. A further step would be to construct some dynamic indicators,
and to study the influence of individual characteristics on these job quality variables to confirm
which groups are relatively disadvantaged.

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