Redefining Work: Assessing Job Quality in EU Countries

Despite the rising employment rates of recent years, the quality of jobs has not improved and, in some cases, even declined in most countries, attracting considerable attention from both academic researchers and international institutions. The erosion of job quality has broader socio-economic repercussions, including reduced social mobility, declining trust in institutions, and the rise of populist political sentiments (Standing, 2014). This complex interplay of economic, institutional, and social factors demonstrates that employment rates alone are insufficient indicators of labor market quality. Comprehensive understanding instead requires examining job quality, security, and remuneration, alongside their impacts on workers’ well-being and social cohesion. Addressing these challenges needs robust policy interventions aimed at strengthening labor protections, promoting fair wages, and ensuring inclusive access to social security systems. The study of job quality is not easy, as it is a multidimensional concept encompassing various aspects, such as fair remuneration, safety, security, adequate work–life balance, and subjective satisfaction. Given the numerous and heterogeneous factors contributing to the notion of job quality — particularly in cross-country comparisons — its assessment is challenging. For this reason, this paper applies the composite indicator methodology. In this study, the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is used to synthesize individual indicators into the pillars, while the aggregation of these pillars into a single composite indicator follows different methods for robustness and sensitivity analyses needs (arithmetic and geometric mean, the Wroclaw taxonomic approach, the Borda’s rule, and the Condorcet’s majority rule, adapted, these latter two, from game theory). The procedure follows the steps suggested in the OECD Handbook (OECD, 2008) and subsequently refined by Paruolo et al. (2013).