GENERATION Y ON LABOUR MARKET – PERCEPTION OF WORK VALUES AND QUALITY OF JOB

Abstract

The purposes of the study were: to characterize the Generation Y as participants in the labour market; to recognize economic conditions of labour markets; to describe social and individual factors of job values/conditions that concern Generation Y. The article presents the results of the carried out research and its main conclusions. Following hypothesis were constructed: the countries that met the conditions for joining the European Union at the same time differ in their respective ways of developing the labour market and differ on these issues from the countries which joined the Union in other periods. Some hypotheses regarding the perception of the workplace were also tested. For this purpose, subjective variables were determined for the assessment of working and private life conditions. The Eurostat data (due to the homogeneity of variables on the labour market) as well as the data from the European Social Survey (due to the representativeness of the data and the subjective nature of respondents' assessments) were used to conduct the study. As to the analysis techniques, ordering methods were selected: Hellwig's and TOPSIS and also twostep cluster analysis. The indicated set of data and selected analysis methods fully enabled the characterization of the phenomenon. In addition, it was possible to compare the results obtained from both ordering methods. As a result, it was found that a higher level of GDP per Capita does not always affect rising the employment rate and lowering the Generation's Y unemployment rate. The methods of ordering made it possible to indicate the countries that in the period from 2005 to 2017 obtained the best characteristics of the labour market. The twostep cluster for Generation Y indicated that it is not important to divide this age cohort into older and younger group because their assessments of quality and working conditions didn?t differ. The analysis carried out over three years showed how the attitudes of the inhabitants of the selected countries towards the balance between private life and work, working conditions and the possibilities of influencing organizational issues at work have changed.The obtained results cannot be compared, in direct way, with the findings of other researches. There are no studies in which analogous methods would be used for a similar population, time range and age cohort.