Employment Relations in Transition: An Examination of Workers' Self-Assessments of Job Quality, 1970 - 2006

Abstract

My dissertation uses data from three sources from 1970 to 2006 to explore trends in American workers’ self-assessed perceptions of job quality over time. I find evidence that contemporary workers tend to assess their jobs more negatively when compared to their 1970s counterparts. This finding is robust to examinations of measurement equivalency across survey instruments. Further, my findings are consistent with a body of research documenting a general deterioration of working conditions in the United States since the mid-1970s. To the best of my knowledge this is the first attempt to document trends on multiple dimensions of perceived job quality, over a span of thirty-six years.