… and the Pursuit of Happiness - Institute of Economic Affairs

… and the pursuit of happiness
wellbeing at work: any lessons?
in many cases higher unemployment and in every case a higher
proportion of people in relatively insecure temporary employment.
The case for any further employment protection in the UK
needs to be seen against the figures in this column.
The third indicator is a subjective indicator of work stress.
The UK comes off relatively poorly in this comparison, although
we should be aware of the point outlined in the Box earlier –
that work stress is an ambiguous concept as it cannot easily
be detached from personal circumstances: two workers in the
same environment can react very differently. Any simple link
between stress and some of the work environment characteristics
mentioned earlier – information and consultation, job protection,
union representation – seems difficult to maintain, given
that Sweden, France and Germany, where the state regulates these
matters much more than in the UK, seem to have higher stress
scores. And the USA, with very little government intervention,
has a markedly lower stress score.
The next indicator, taken from the same International Social
Survey, also has the UK in a fairly low position. There are again,
however, some interesting features of this column which make
drawing any simple conclusions for policy rather difficult. The
USA again does comparatively well on this indicator, despite its
low level of regulation. Perhaps more curiously, while for most
countries their comparative rankings on the stress and job satisfaction
indicator are similar, for Austria, Germany and (most
markedly) Poland, their rankings are very different on the two
indicators. We might posit that it is possible to have jobs which
are stressful but satisfying as in Austria and Germany, but also
scale of 0–6. Germany is 2.4, France 2.9, Spain 3.0. Only the USA, at 0.7 on this
scale, has a lower score than the UK among developed nations.
to have jobs where there is little pressure but the work is unsatisfying,
as in Poland. 19
The final column shows a more recent measure of overall
wellbeing at work. The New Economics Foundation is a strong
advocate of using wellbeing accounts to help determine economic
policy, and to assist its argument it has used a series of questions
in the 2006/07 European Social Survey, which covered 40,000
respondents in 22 countries. In the case of wellbeing at work, it
uses six questions 20 to produce a composite index with a ten-point
scale. Again the UK is near the bottom, although again Germany
is below the UK. Both these countries, incidentally, show lower
ratings on this wellbeing at work indicator than they do on the
NEF’s wider measure of personal wellbeing, which covers such
characteristics as having a satisfying life, self-esteem, optimism,
resilience, competence and autonomy.
Taking these indicators together, three European countries
appear to perform consistently well: Austria, Ireland and
Denmark. They are each relatively small economies and have
fairly homogeneous populations. They each have comparatively
low levels of employment protection, but in other respects their
labour market policies differ. Denmark spends much larger
amounts on active labour market policies (retraining and reactivating
those not in work) than the other two countries, and the
19 Conceivably the Polish case is to some extent a hangover from the communist
period, when there was little pressure on workers but conditions and pay were
poor: as the cynical old line had it: ‘We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay
us’.
20 The questions covered job satisfaction, work–life balance, interest in the job, proportion
of the time the individual experienced stress in their job, the subjective
likelihood of becoming unemployed in the next twelve months, and the appropriateness
of the respondent’s pay.
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