Work has been getting a bad press lately. We’ve had the “great resignation” trend, the “anti-work” movement, “quiet quitting” and a wave of strikes. It all seems to add up to a sense that work is getting worse and people are fed up with it. I was even asked to join a podcast discussion last year called “Is this the end of work as we know it?”But that’s not necessarily what the data says, at least in the UK. When Alan Felstead and Rhys Davies at Cardiff University ran an online quiz in 2018/19 and again in 2022, they gathered about 100,000 responses from people across the country who answered detailed questions about their jobs. The academics found that in 2022, people reported more ability to decide when to start and stop work, more scope to take time off in an emergency, more supportive managers, less work pressure, more say in job-related decisions, better promotion prospects and higher job security. On the down side, they had less discretion over their work tasks.
It’s worth treating online quiz data with some caution, as the authors readily admit. The sample size was huge but the respondents were self-selecting and skewed somewhat towards women, people working in the public sector and professional jobs (though the academics tried to account for this with weightings).
But a separate survey of UK job quality run annually by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development also leans against the notion that work has become worse on average: most metrics have stayed pretty steady, with some improvement in work-life balance.