If You’re Happy and You Know It... Job Satisfaction in the Low Wage Service Sector

The issue of worker satisfaction is important both for the sake of individuals themselves and also for employers for whom happy staff should be productive staff. Highly satisfied staff have been shown to have lower propensities to quit and to be absent. Whilst there have been some interesting contributions in this field, the existing studies are weakened by their inability to control for workplace characteristics. Uniquely, our data set, covering three low wage sectors, enables us to do this whilst still providing a wealth of demographic information. Using principal components analysis we examine five measures of workers’ satisfaction and find that individuals respond quite differently depending upon the measure of contentment employed. We then examine which of our component forms of satisfaction has the greatest impact on overall satisfaction. Satisfaction with short-term rewards and long-term prospects are found to be far more influential in determining overall satisfaction than contentment with social relationships or work intensity. This paper was produced as part of the Centre’s Industrial Relations Programme If You’re Happy and You Know It... Job Satisfaction in the Low Wage Service Sector Donna Brown and Steven McIntosh