Non-Standard Employment and Quality of Work: Towards New Forms of Measurement

This chapter deals with the issue of measuring quality of work according to the subjective perception that each single worker has of it. The essay starts out from the definition put forward by Gallino (1993), who identifies four dimensions of the quality of labour (ergonomic, of complexity, of autonomy and of control), analysing it and integrating it with two other two dimensions: the relational/social dimension of work bound up in the need for social recognition and the dimension of compatibility between working/ living time/conditions. A measuring method is put forward, articulated across the six dimensions, grouping together about 50 elementary indicators into synthetic indexes of various levels, exploiting a fuzzy expert system based on a previous model proposed in Addabbo, Facchinetti, Mastroleo and Solinas (2007). The method is applied to the micro-data gathered in the province of Modena, from 719 workers in a company sample ranging from the light-engineering sector to building, services, food, IT and clothing. The results do not indicate the existence of compensating wage differentials, but rather seem to indicate the presence of a job market segmentation between standard and non-standard employment and between different types of qualification.