Job Quality Matters

Abstract

This special issue of the Journal of Industrial Relations focuses on job quality. Implicitly and explicitly, job quality features strongly in current debates about work amongst policymakers, practitioners and academics. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) (2010) makes strong demands for a ‘decent work’ policy agenda to raise labour standards, enhance employment and income opportunities, provide social protection and social security, and promote social dialogue. With the Lisbon Agreement of 2000, the EU has also promoted ‘decent work’, trying to balance the raising of employment participation and improvements to job quality (see Kok High Level Expert Group, 2004). In the US, unions and think tanks have called for improvements to job quality to deal with social and economic problems (AFL-CIO, 2008; Brookings Institute, 2007). In addition to the recent publication of a raft of academic books on the subject (e.g. Bazen et al., 2005; Gallie, 2007; Gautie & Schmitt, 2010; Green, 2006, 2009), academics on both sides of the Atlantic oriented to public policy have called for a ‘new deal’ or ‘new strategy’ for workers in bad jobs (Grimshaw et al., 2008; Haley-Lock & Ewert, this issue; Osterman, 2008; see also the UK’s ESRC-funded seminar series Making Bad Jobs Better, available at: http://ewds.strath.ac.uk/badjobsbetter/Home.aspx). Debates about job quality are not new. Throughout the last half of the 20th century (if not earlier; see Darr & Warhurst, 2009), two camps fought a war about the future of work. On the one side were the optimists, plotting a rising