This paper reviews the literature on what people value in employment and on methods of measuring the quality of employment, with a view to measuring it in New Zealand. In New Zealand’s current labour market context of skill and labour shortages, historically low unemployment, people working long hours, an ageing population, increasing female labour force participation, increasing proportion of dual income families and increasing number of people in non-standard employment, the government’s attention has broadened from simply increasing the quantity of jobs to improving the quality of jobs. Such changes have consequences for employee well-being and the quality of employment. Poor quality employment is associated with a range of less than positive outcomes. The quality of employment (sometimes referred to as ‘quality of work’; ‘quality of working life’; ‘job quality’; or ‘good jobs and bad jobs’) has also increasingly becoming the focus of attention among labour market analysts and policy makers in the European Union and OECD countries as they face similar changes. Europe and Canada are ahead of New Zealand in studying values and the quality of employment, so we can learn useful lessons from them.
The quality of employment is relevant to the Department of Labour’s (DoL) work, as reflected in its overall outcome of productive work and high-quality working lives. It advises the government on a wide range of policies that have the potential to influence the quality of people’s working lives in areas such as labour force participation, productivity, return to sustainable earnings after work illness/injury, work-life balance, pay and employment equity, the Decent Work Action Plan (DWAP), the regulatory environment for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), employment relations, health and safety, skills training, identifying and meeting skills needs, labour market information and immigration.