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This article analyses the development and use of the concept ‘job quality’ in European Union (EU) employment policy. Using a set of complementary public policy theories, it examines how both political and conceptual factors contributed to the failure to achieve any significant progress in articulating job quality in the EU’s policy objectives and guidelines. Conceptual clarity in defining what job quality is (and what it is not), from whose perspective it should be considered, and which direction of change indicates improvement, are vital prerequisites for an effective integration of job quality into the EU’s employment strategy and into the elaboration of any successful social indicator. A constant political struggle between different stakeholders at EU level, and a need to reconcile the often-contradictory views of the social partners, has precluded the completion of this first step. Instead, attempts to include job quality into the policy formulation process were made without simultaneously adapting the overall narrative, which continued to give prominence to flexibility and deregulation. The outcome has been a rather cursory and inconsistent effort to implement policies and actions aimed at boosting job quality.

Swift trust has long been considered of critical importance to the work of project teams and other forms of temporary organizing, but research has remained heavily fragmented in regard to its antecedents or bases. This contribution conducts a systematic review of the literature and derives from it seven possible bases of swift trust. The relative significance of each of these bases is tested through a survey of 172 project managers. Its findings allow for the distillation of the bases of swift trust into three coherent thematic blocks of different significance in the creation of swift trust. Bases related to team composition exert the strongest effects, whereas reputational and institutional information demonstrates much more limited effects, and action-related bases of swift trust are shown to be largely irrelevant. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the formation of swift trust and resolve existing tensions found in the literature.

This study compared relations between work demands and support, work-to-family conflict (WFC) and job outcomes in Ghana and the United Kingdom. Data were obtained from 217 Ghanaian employees and 198 British employees using structured questionnaires. Results from multigroup structural equation modelling analyses showed that job pressure was positively related to WFC in Ghana and the United Kingdom, whereas supervisor support was negatively related to WFC in Ghana only. WFC was negatively related to job satisfaction and positively related to turnover intentions in both countries. More importantly, the relationship between job pressure and WFC was stronger for British employees than for Ghanaian employees. Finally, job pressure was indirectly related to job satisfaction and turnover intentions via WFC in both countries, whereas supervisor support was indirectly related to job satisfaction and turnover intentions in Ghana only. The implications of these findings for cross-cultural research on the work–family interface and managerial practice are discussed.

There are predictions that in future rapid technological development could result in a significant shortage of paid work. A possible option currently debated by academics, policy makers, trade unions, employers and mass media, is a shorter working week for everyone. In this context, two important research questions that have not been asked so far are: what is the minimum amount of paid employment needed to deliver some or all of the well-being and\ud mental health benefits that employment has been shown to bring? And what is the optimum number of working hours at which the mental health of workers is at its highest? To answer these questions, this study used the UK Household Longitudinal Study (2009-2018) data from individuals aged between 16 and 64. The analytical sample was 156,734 person-wave observations from 84,993 unique persons of whom 71,113 had two or more measurement times. Fixed effects regressions were applied to examine how changes in work hours were linked to changes in mental well-being within each individual over time. This study found that even a small number of working hours (between one and eight hours a week) generates significant mental health and well-being benefits for previously unemployed or economically\ud inactive individuals. The findings suggest there is no single optimum number of working hours at which well-being and mental health are at their highest - for most groups of workers there was little variation in wellbeing between the lowest (1 to 8 hours) through to the highest (44 to 48 hours) category of working hours. These findings provide important and timely empirical evidence for future of work planning, shorter working week policies and have\ud implications for theorising the future models of organising work in society.

Youth unemployment has become the global “wicked” policy issue for governments and multilateral agencies with many regions experiencing endemically high levels. In response, governments and international organizations have introduced more active labor market interventions to address youth unemployment. Self-employment and entrepreneurship programs are seen as the key mechanisms to reduce unemployment, welfare dependency, and poverty. We use the International Labour Organization’s 2012 School-to-Work Transition Survey from 28 developing countries to provide new evidence of young people’s experience of job quality and associated working conditions in self-employment. We find that self-employment is not necessarily a favorable employment status in terms of the economic and social benefits it provides for young people. In countries often characterized by limited formal employment opportunities, a large informal sector and depressed local labor markets, self-employment can be seen as the only realistic way many young people can generate an income. Entry into self-employment can be more accurately described as a pragmatic coping mechanism by the young person and their family to get by rather than as evidence of entrepreneurship and a pathway to get on in terms of social mobility and poverty alleviation. We find little evidence that young people are making utility-maximizing decisions concerning their employment status. Furthermore, we argue that if youth employment policies overlook the importance and role of kinship networks in the uptake of self-employment, they are likely to be even less effective than other programs to promote entrepreneurship., ILO

Existing urban research has focused on gender differences in commuting patterns to and from homes, but has paid little attention to the gendered diversity in the spatiotemporal patterns of work. The increase in remote working and information and communications technology (ICT) work has been emphasised, but at the cost of exploring the full range of workplaces and multi-locational working observed in urban areas. This article develops a new classificatory system to analyse the spatiotemporal patterns of work in European cities using the 2015 6th European Working Conditions Survey. We identify 12 distinct spatiotemporal work patterns of full-time workers and investigate gender differences across these patterns against the backdrop of occupation, industrial sector, employment status, household composition and ICT use. Findings show that women are far more likely to be restricted to only working at the employer/business premises while men have more varied and complex spatiotemporal patterns of work. Multi-locational working rather than working at one workplace is a largely male phenomenon. Working exclusively at home is still a rarity, but combinations with employer premises and other workplaces are more common. We conclude that workplace research has been blinkered by narrow concerns of advances in mobile technologies and has been blind to the pervasive effects of spatiotemporal divisions in the working lives of men and women. The methodological and theoretical implications of this new perspective on workplaces for urban development and research are discussed.

This paper provides an overview of the key factors impacting upon the gender pay gap in the UK, Europe and Australia. Forty years after the implementation of the first equal pay legislation, the pay gap remains a key aspect of the inequalities women face in the labour market. While the overall pay gap has tended to fall in many countries over the past forty years, it has not closed; in some countries it has been stubbornly resistant, or has even widened. In reviewing the collection of papers that make up this special issue we identify four broad themes with which to group the contributions and draw out the explanations for diverse trends: theoretical and conceptual debates; legal developments and their impacts; wage setting institutions and changing employer demands; and newly emerging pay inequalities between and within educational and ethnic groups. Across the four themes we underline how the trends in the gender pay gap capture the dynamism of inequalities, as the market power of different groups and stakeholders changes over times. Three key dimensions emerge from the papers to provide a framework for future research and policy discourse: the relationship between litigation and bargaining strategies; the interaction between wage-setting institutions and new organisational practices; and the increasing and range of diversity or equality strands competing for equal treatment. We conclude that progress towards closing the gender pay gap will not be easy, will require a collective effort of various actors, and will not be quick.

Promoting job quality and gender equality are objectives of the European Employment Strategy (EES) in spite of a downgrading of the attention given to both in the revised employment guidelines and the re-launch of the Lisbon Process. However, advances on both of these objectives may be important complements to the employment rate targets of the EES, as access to good quality jobs for both sexes is likely to help sustain higher employment rates. While the European Commission has a broad view of the concept of job quality in practice, it relies on a selection of labour market type indicators that say little about the quality of the actual jobs people do. Using data from the 2005 European Working Conditions survey, we analyse job quality along three dimensions: job content, autonomy and working conditions. We conclude that gender and occupational status, along with other job characteristics such as working time and sector, have more influence on an individual’s job quality than the country or ‘national model’ they are situated in. Our results also demonstrate the value of developing indicators of job quality that are both gender sensitive and derived at the level of the job rather than the labour market in order to advance EU policy and academic debate on this topic.

This article explores the development of concepts related to the 'quality of employment' in the academic literature in terms of their definition, methodological progress and ongoing policy debates. Over time, these concepts have evolved from simple studies of job satisfaction towards more comprehensive measures of job and employment quality, including the International Labour Organization's concept of 'Decent Work' launched in 1999. This article compares the parallel development of quality of employment measures in the European Union with the ILO's Decent Work agenda and concludes that the former has advanced much further due to more consistent efforts to generate internationally comparable data on labour markets, which permit detailed measurements and international comparisons. In contrast, Decent Work remains a very broadly defined concept, which is impossible to measure across countries. We conclude by proposing three important differences between these two scenarios that have lead to such diverging paths: the lack of availability of internationally comparable data, the control over the research agenda by partisan social actors, and a prematurely mandated definition of Decent Work that is extremely vague and all-encompassing.

Background and purpose The link between brain iron deficiency and RLS is now well established. In a related observation, several conditions that can deplete iron stores have been linked to increased probability of RLS. Blood donation has been linked to iron deficiency. It has thus been hypothesized that donating blood may be a risk factor for developing RLS. Patients and methods Two thousand and five UK blood donors, ranging from first-time donors to some who had donated more than 70 times, completed the validated Cambridge-Hopkins RLS questionnaire (CH-RLSq) following their donation session. The questionnaire included a set of questions designed to diagnose RLS. The donors’ histories of blood donations were determined both from self-report and from the National Blood Service database. Results A number of statistical models were constructed to determine whether the probability of RLS diagnosis was related to the history of blood donations. Controlling for age and sex, no evidence was found to suggest that a greater number or frequency of blood donations increased the risk of RLS. Even amongst sub-groups especially vulnerable to iron depletion through blood donation, such as vegetarians or low weight individuals, no evidence for an increased risk of RLS could be found. Conclusions We found no evidence that the frequency or number of blood donations up to the UK maximum of three times a year would increase the risk of RLS.