Subjective well-being of non-standard workers in Russia
On 27 October 2011 Tatiana Karabchuk (Deputy Director at the LCSR) and Marina Nikitina (research assistant at the LCSR) gave a talk on “Subjective well-being of non-standard workers in Russia".
Standard employment means that employers work full-time on the basis of an unlimited contract. There are different types of non-standard employment such as temporary (fixed-term contracts, contracts for particular tasks or by oral agreement), informal (without written contracts), part-time (less than 30 hours per week) and secondary (additional job).
Non-standard employment gained importance after the collapse of USSR. Standard employment is associated with stability and certainty while non-standard employment - with lower wages, lack of social benefits, lower skilled work, etc. Hence, it is possible to assume that type of employment influences social well-being.
The main objective of the research is to reveal the impact of employment type on life-satisfaction and social well-being and to compare the differences between countries.
Tatiana and Marina demonstrated that country patterns of temporary and part-time employment are relatively stable and vary considerably by country. Spain, Poland and Portugal are the leaders in temporary type of employment, whereas the Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK lead in part-time employment.
As for Russia, the level of temporary employment is increasing while the level of part-time employment is generally stable (according to the RosStat data, 1992-2007).
For the empirical analysis Tatiana and Marina used RLMS which allows pointing out part-timers, causal workers (who don’t have permanent job but do occasional work for pay), informal workers and secondary employed. The typical portraits of different types of non-standard workers are distinct from each other.
There are at least four groups of factors of non-standard employment: global economic trends, institutional background, labor demand and labor supply. In order to estimate the role of different factors Tatiana and Marina built probit regression models for casual/non-casual, part-time/full-time, informal/formal and secondary/single type of employment. The effects of such factors like gender, age, educational attainment and marriage status were not always the same.
Speaking about subjective well-being, economically non-active respondents are the least satisfied with their health, while unemployed are the least satisfied with life in general. Furthermore, Tatiana and Marina used probit regression to measure the effect of non-standard employment on life satisfaction and subjective health (compared to socio-demographic and socio-economic characteristics). In most cases non-standard employment is negatively correlated with subjective well-being except that casual employment is positively correlated with subjective health.
The main idea of the future project is to disclose differences between the countries in the impact of employment type on people’s social well-being. Unfortunately in World Values Survey database it is possible to distinguish only between full-time and part-time employees. There are the following indicators of social well-being on WVS: happiness, life satisfaction, job satisfaction, financial satisfaction and subjective health. The researchers demonstrated preliminary descriptive statistics on three of these indicators (happiness, life satisfaction and subjective health) including the difference between full-time and part-time workers.
During the discussion some questions about methodology were raised. Christian Welzel suggested that the nature of one’s work, characteristics of job can have an impact on social well-being.