What is a Good Job and Who Gets It? A Typological Analysis of Job Quality in a Global Sample of Countries

Job quality is a topic that has become increasingly popular in recent years. However, what defines a good or a bad job remains an object of debate. Moreover, most of the evidence available is limited to waged workers in high income countries. In this work, we adopt a typological approach to answer the following research questions: (1) What types of jobs exist based on the different patterns or configurations of job characteristics? (2) Do these empirically derived job types map neatly into ‘good’ or ‘bad’ jobs? (3) How are job types distributed across workers? We do this using survey data from the 2015 wave of the International Social Survey Program, that includes self-employed and waged workers in 37 high, low and middle-income countries. We perform a cluster analysis including 15 items measuring both extrinsic and intrinsic job characteristics. We confirm empirically that job characteristics tend to cluster in two groups that align with notions of good and bad jobs in the literature. Furthermore, respondents in these two groups display marked differences in their job satisfaction level and job quit intentions, in line with theoretical expectations. Finally, we show that workers in low skilled jobs, with lower levels of education, recent unemployment spells and waged workers are more likely to be in the ‘bad jobs’ cluster. Our findings validate empirically existing theories of job quality and provide evidence of segmentation in the labour market in a global sample of countries.