Category: Employment & work

How satisfied are people with their jobs?

~ Andrew Norton ~ Leave a comment

The youth survey released this week found that 84% of full-time workers and 78% of part-time workers aged 18 to 24 were satisfied with their jobs. 41% said that they were very satisfied (though unfortunately there was no option just to be ‘satisfied’, just ‘very satisfied’ or ‘somewhat satisfied’). How does this compare with workers in general?

Surveys have consistently found high levels of work satisfaction. In the Changing Australian survey of 1983, 49% of respondents said that they were very satisfied with their work and a further 38% were moderately satisfied, with 86% satisfied overall. 14% were a little or very dissatisfied. The National Social Science Survey of 1987-88 asked respondents to rate their work satisfaction on a 1 to 10 scale. If we class 6 or more as moderately satisfied or above then 85% were satisfied, almost exactly the same as the 1983 survey. If 1 to 4 are ‘dissatisfied’ then 9% fell into that category, but if we count those circling ‘5’ as a little dissatisfied again we can get a near exact match with 1983.

In a Saulwick Poll conducted before the 2001 election, 86% were satisfied – again, a very similar number to the other surveys. They separately identified casuals, 21% of whom were dissatisfied compared to 13% of the sample overall. This is quite similar to the division the Newspoll youth survey finds, though whether the problem is the casual work status or the nature of the employment is not clear (many casuals are students, who may find the low-level service jobs they do while studying unstimulating compared to the studies and low-status compared to their aspirations).
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Shock, horror – young people satisfied with their lives

~ Andrew Norton ~ 14 Comments

A Newspoll survey of 18 to 24 year olds, commissioned by the Dusseldorp Skills Forum and reported in today’s Age, would have provided useful extra information for Cassandra Wilkinson’s new book Don’t Panic: Nearly everything is better than you think, a rebuttal of misery merchants like Richard Eckersley and Simon Castles (the Australian Literary Review has an extract from Wilkinson’s book).

Overall, 95% of those Newspoll surveyed regarded themselves as satisfied with their life overall, with nearly half ‘very satisfied’ – not quite in Danish life satisfaction territory, but up there with the Dutch and the Swedes. 88% are confident that things will work out ok in their working lives and careers, and 86% are confident that they will be financially secure. Of those currently in the workforce, 84% of full-timers and 78% of part-timers are satisfied with their job overall. Of those at university, 46% say it is better than they expected, while 15% say they are disappointed. About a third think that their standard of living will be better than that of their parents; most think it will be the same while 9% think that it will be not as good.
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Conflicting WorkChoices polls?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 1 Comment

Commenter Leopold notes about today’s industrial relations Newspoll, reported in The Australian, that there is

A curious difference between Newspoll and ACNielsen …- 33% of Newspoll respondents reckon they are worse off under WorkChoices. And ‘a lot worse off’ is rising in Newspoll, while in ACN the overall figure ‘worse off’ is falling.

There are two differences between the ACNielsen and Newspoll surveys that may help explain the different results. The first is that ACNielsen asks its question of all respondents, while Newspoll only asks people with jobs. This is a smaller sample that is more likely to be affected by the changes than those without jobs (though those without jobs could still be affected, via other members of their household who do have jobs). Newspoll records more people affected both positively and negatively.

That probably explains most of the difference, but the second possible reason is that Newspoll gives options of varying strength. Its question reads:

How do you think the changes to industrial relations affect you personally? Do you think you are better, or worse, off? If better, do you think you are a lot better off, or a little better off? If worse, do you think that you are a lot worse off or a little worse off?

Whereas ACNielsen asks (if they are consistent, they did not publish the questions last time):

Do you think you will be better or worse off under the planned changes?

Offering milder options can sometimes encourage people without strong views to reveal which perspective they are leaning towards.
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What do returns to education say about graduate mismatch?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 13 Comments

Andrew Leigh agrees that some people have more qualifications than they need for their jobs. But he’s not convinced that over-education is a problem:

The returns to education have stayed very stable over the past 20 years. If anything, there’s a bigger economic benefit to going to university today than in the past.

It is true that there is no evidence that average returns to higher education have gone down over the past twenty years. But I would not expect the statistics I have been citing to affect average returns as there have always been similar proportions of over-qualified workers, who would have consistently dragged down the averages over time. Though the statistics in my graduate mismatch paper (pdf) only go back to 1991, the time of the last enrolment boom, I also checked some earlier data.

It gets a little complicated because the job categories used by the ABS have changed over the years, but matching as much as I can we get very similar over-education statistics through the years. The earliest data I could find was from 1979, and at that time the proportion of graduates in non-graduate jobs (with the caveat in the first sentence) was 18.7%, remarkably similarly to the 19.2% I calculate for 2006. For 1986 I arrive at a figure of 19.8%. In 1996 it was 22%, but that was a temporary aberration, the unfortunate consequence of the Dawkins enrolment boom graduating into the Keating recession. It was back down to 18.9% in 1998.
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Can too much education be bad for you?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 54 Comments

In my post on graduates in the labour market, commenter Russell was keen to defend his thesis that education is valuable, even when it is hard to point to any advantage gained. But could over-education be worse than not actually producing any benefits? Could it be making life worse for the over-educated?

I took a look at the 2003 Australian Survey of Social Attitudes to see how use of abilities/qualifications at work was linked to various other questions in the survey (I would have used the 2005 survey, except the site was playing up). I was looking at all workers, not just university graduates.

There were clear differences on job satisfaction. Among those who thought they were using their abilities/qualifications at work, only 4% were clearly dissatisfied with their jobs (which I defined as rating themselves between 0 and 5 on a 0 to 10 job satisfaction scale). But among those who thought they were not using their abilities/qualifications, 28% were dissatisfied.

This seemed to spillover into financial dissatisfaction. Of those not using their abilities/qualifications, 29% said they were finding it difficult or very difficult to manage on their current household income, compared to 13% of the appropriately qualified group. Optimism about the future was also affected, with 40% of the over-educated believing that people like themselves had a good chance of improving their standard of living, compared to 55% of the appropriately educated group.

The over-educated were more prone to unhappiness as well, with 22% below 6 on the 0-10 happiness scale, compared to 10% among those who thought they were using their abilities/qualifications at work.

I found only one indicator on which the over-educated appeared to be better off – they were less likely to report their work interfering with their family/personal life (31% compared to 40%).
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Campaigns versus personal experience

~ Andrew Norton ~ 6 Comments

Another poll on WorkChoices today, confirming that opinion on this is extraordinarily stable. In this latest ACNielsen poll, 59% oppose WorkChoices. This is the sixth poll they have conducted on the issue since July 2005, and opposition has ranged from a low of 57% (October 2005) to a high of 60% (July 2005). As I noted in January, Newspoll is also showing little movement on this support/oppose question.

What is changing is opinon on WorkChoices’ personal effects. In the first poll, 31% of respondents thought that they would be worse off. In June last year, a few months after WorkChoices came into effect, 27% of respondents thought that they would be worse off. In early March this year when the poll was taken, 21% thought that they would be worse off.

Given the massive effort that has gone into convincing people that they would be worse off, this seems to support the theory that in matters people can decide for themselves from their general experience neither propaganda nor expert opinion are likely to have a large impact.

The unions and the ALP instantly won the battle over whether or not WorkChoices was a good idea; with a strong economy most people didn’t see a need for change. But on the issue of personal impact, consistent campaigning against WorkChoices hasn’t been enough to overcome the realisation that for most workers nothing has changed.

Unhealthy central planning

~ Andrew Norton ~ 75 Comments

My new CIS paper (pdf) on mismatches in the graduate labour market is getting off to a rather slow media start (only the Courier-Mail so far, though a couple of other papers requested opinion pieces as well). The Australian and The Age are however running different stories on foreign doctor recruitment – and there is no better illustration than these of the problem I am talking about.

In fact, doctors provide a double tale in what goes wrong when governments intervene. This story starts in 1984, when the then Hawke government introduced the Medicare system, and in so doing ensured that the government picked up most of the tab for visits to the doctor. This in turn led to concern about escalating costs, on the (plausible) theory that if you charge people nothing or very little to go to doctor they will be more likely to do so.

In the early 1990s, the government formed the view that an over-supply of doctors was part of the problem. According to one report (no. 12 in the link)
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Are we really short of discretionary time?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 10 Comments

Even after all the recent work-family balance hype, I still found this comment from Graham Bell in Mark Bahnisch’s good-bye-for-now-because-I-am-too-busy post jaw-droppingly preposterous:

You have here touched on two aspects of life in 2007’s Australia:

[i] The rapidly worsening lack of discretionary time for so many people now, even for pensioners/retirees and the unemployed.

Gosh, imagine how pressed they might be if they actually had to work for money 40-50 hours a week, plus do all the other things that disproportionately fall to those in paid work, such as raising kids and keeping voluntary organisations going. Even for those who genuinely do have a lot on, there is an important distinction made by Michael Bittman, Robert Goodin and others between discretionary time and free time (pdf).

Discretionary time is what we have left after we’ve done enough to earn money, perform household chores and engage in sufficient personal care (eg sleeping). Admittedly, some of the arguments as to what constitutes enough are contentious; but the overall point is a strong one: because many people choose to do more than the minimum necessary across a range of generally essential activities their free time, the time in which they have no commitments, is much less than their discretionary time. Using a 1992 Australian time use survey, they estimate that discretionary time is two to three times as long as free time.
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Gittinomics

~ Andrew Norton ~ 7 Comments

I’ve long been in two minds about SMH economics columnist Ross Gittins. A couple of years ago I suggested that there were two Ross Gittins, the Saturday Ross Gittins whose column in the paper’s business section is often an easily-understood explanation of economic ideas and behaviour, and the Wednesday Ross Gittins whose column on the opinion page is regularly a Clive Hamiltonesque critique of modern society – we’d be better off working less, having fewer material goods, facing less confusing choice etc.

I think we need more writers like the Saturday Ross Gittins, demystifying economics and correcting mistaken ‘common sense’ economic reasoning. The boom in science writing for a general audience has not been matched by a boom in similarly-pitched economics writing, though books like Tim Harford’s The Undercover Economist and Steve Levitt’s Freakonomics have sold well (though the latter is not really about the economy as usually understood).

Whether we need more writers like the Wednesday Ross Gittins is another matter. As with the Saturday Ross Gittins, the Wednesday Ross Gittins is mainly a recycler of other people’s research, but usually of non-economists. But for some reason – perhaps because he is supposed to be an economics columnist, or maybe because many writers enjoy the pose of ‘dissent’ – the Wednesday Ross Gittins contrasts the view he is presenting with those of ‘conventional economics’, ‘economic rationalists’ or businesspeople. But, as is common in the anti-economics literature, these are never named economists or businesspeople. The smell of straw men burning comes from these arguments.

Both Ross Gittins are on display in his new book Gittinomics (extract here), which joins quackonomics as a play on Levitt’s Freakonomics. While there is not much conventional micro or macro economics to be found, there is interesting information to be found about what he calls ‘home economics’ – work, education, family, housing, health etc.
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The rise of a factoid

~ Andrew Norton ~ 12 Comments

Early this month, Labor MP Craig Emerson released some ABS data collated by the Parliamentary Library, using it to argue that

two-thirds of the jobs created under the Howard government have needed a university degree as a prerequisite.

Blogger Tim Dunlop was quick to describe it as a ‘telling statistic’. Victorian Skills Minister Jacinta Allan thinks it is telling too, using it in her complaints that Victoria gets too few university places to match demand for graduates in the labour market, a line repeated in today’s front-page lead story in The Age and on page three of the AFR. (Update: And it replicates itself again in Tuesday’s Age editorial.)

But how good is this number? The Parliamentary Library used these assumptions in arriving at their figure:

Level of qualification has been derived on the basis of the occupations in which people are employed. Hence, persons with degree qualifications or higher are assumed to be either ‘managers and administrators’, ‘professionals’ or ‘associate professionals’; persons with other tertiary qualifications are assumed to be either ‘tradespersons and related workers’ or ‘advanced clerical and service workers’; and persons with school level qualifications are assumed to be persons employed in any of the other occupations.

But when we look at the definitions of these ‘degree qualification’ occupations in the ABS classification of occupations this assumption does not look so sound. For ‘managers and administrators’ the ABS states that most occupations in this group

have a level of skill commensurate with a bachelor degree or higher qualification or at least five years relevant experience (my emphasis)

For professionals, too, the emphasis is on skills commensurate with holding a bachelor degree or above. But for ‘associate professionals’ the assumption is weakest:

have a level of skill commensurate with an AQF [Australian Qualifications Framework, usually taught in the vocational education sector] Diploma or higher qualification or at least 3 years relevant experience.

Indeed, this ‘associate professional’ category isn’t very satisfactory and the new system of occupational classifications developed with the NZ statistics people is discontinuing it, with those previously in it being dispersed to other categories including ‘Technicians and trade workers’, ‘Clerical and administrative workers’ and ‘Community and personal service workers’.

The weakness of the assumption can be seen if we examine the actual qualifications of people in these occupations, which we can do through the annual supplement to the ABS labour market survey reported in Education and Work.

In 2006, nearly 80% of workers classified as ‘associate professional’ did not have a university degree. Among managers, over 60% did not have a degree. Only the professions were principally the preserve of degree-holders, with 70% having a university qualification. Even the overall trend is quite modest. 42% of all workers in these occupations were degree-holders in 1996, and 49% in 2006. So many of the jobs for which we supposedly need degree-holders are in fact filled by people who don’t have one, and probably most of the ‘associate professionals’ and some of the other groups would not necessarily benefit greatly from having one.

I don’t expect my pedantry will do much good in the face of a politically-convenient factoid. You will hear this statistic again and again – but do some mental discounting when it happens. On my calculations, just under half of jobs created in that decade were for degree-holders. As I argued last month working out how many graduates we need is a very complex task, but on my analysis our main problem is the wrong mix of graduates, rather than too few overall.