The job market is better than it was a few years ago, but that doesn’t necessarily mean people are getting the jobs they really want. When it comes to psychological well-being, which is better – being unemployed or having a job that doesn’t stimulate you?
for The Conversation UK to discuss this concept based on research from the Household, Income and Labor Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey in Australia and results published by Peter Butterworth and colleagues at the Australian National University.
So what makes a job good or bad?
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“Psychosocial job quality involves the degree to which jobs promote control, autonomy, challenge, variety and task discretion,” Bevan wrote.
The economic reasoning behind providing new jobs for people doesn’t account for what the toll is on mental health for people who end up taking temporary jobs, or jobs not in their desired field at all.
Being in poor-quality work which, perhaps, is boring, routine or represents underemployment or a poor match for the employee’s skills is widely regarded as a good way for the unemployed to remain connected to the labor market — and to keep the work habit. But Butterworth’s data contradicts this. The HILDA data shows unambiguously that the psychosocial quality of bad jobs is worse than unemployment. Butterworth looked at those moving from unemployment into employment and found that:
Those who moved into optimal jobs showed significant improvement in mental health compared to those who remained unemployed. Those respondents who moved into poor-quality jobs showed a significant worsening in their mental health compared to those who remained unemployed.
The idea that “any job is a good job” isn’t necessarily a healthy way of thinking about stimulating the work force, in any country. Not only that, but once people take these “bad” jobs, things might not work out for the same reason.
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“We should probably question whether the revolving-door characteristics of some policies in which many people fall back out of work soon after being found a job might — in part — owe their poor performance to the damaging psychosocial quality of the work itself,” Bevan wrote.
[Photo from flickr user Stephen Coles]
