(17 February 2016) – The OECD has just published a framework for measuring and assessing job quality, while comparing the organisation’s member countries.
The framework considers three objective and measurable dimensions of job quality that are both important for worker well-being and relevant for policy – earnings quality, labour market security, and quality of the working environment.
Overall, job quality outcomes vary substantially across OECD countries along each of the three dimensions:
• Australia, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Luxembourg, Norway, and Switzerland are among the best performers. These countries do relatively well in at least two of the three dimensions of job quality, without any outcomes in the bottom-10 of the ranking.
• Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Slovenia, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States display average performance. Over the three dimensions of job quality, most of these countries display no more than one outcome in the top-10 or the bottom-10 of the ranking.
• Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Spain and Turkey do relatively badly in two or all of the three dimensions of job quality. In addition, none of these countries performs very well in at least one of these dimensions.