lower happiness and increased anxiety.9 In the United States the nonincome impacts of unemployment have been estimated to be five times greater than the income impact.10 The unhappiness of becoming unemployed is not something that people adjust to quickly, if at all. In Germany life satisfaction declines sharply on losing a job, and there is little evidence of any improvement among men even after three or more years of unemployment.11 So unemployment is miserable, and work is satisfying. But is it merely having a job or some other aspect of work that matters in terms of human happiness (box 1.3)?
Voice and participation
Today, traditional forms of worker organizations like trade unions are weak
Unions, political parties, women’s groups and other collective entities have long provided workers with a means for voice and participation—critical for value and quality of work. Through these platforms, workers have formed shared values and collective interests and pursued them. This has resulted in real gains, even in the face of powerful opposition, as for example, in the 1980s in Brazil when workers gained better rights and wages and in South Africa when movements helped legalize Black trade unions.12 Through such processes, workers have substantially strengthened the link between work and human development, including protections against health hazards
at work, higher compensation and social insurance. Over recent decades the potential for strong worker negotiating power has steadily atrophied—because of globalization, which pits workers in different countries against each other; because of technological innovations, which have atomized the workforce; and because of new working patterns, which include more short-term work that blurs the lines between formal and informal work. It is now harder for workers to unite for mass action, to some extent a desired management outcome. Some employers have deliberately shaped innovation so as to weaken labour power, using new technologies to monitor workers more closely and reduce their scope for controlling their work environment. Today, traditional forms of worker organizations like trade unions are weak and represent fewer members than in the past. Looking at union members as a percentage of employees, variations across countries are considerable. While such membership is quite strong in Argentina, Kenya and South Africa (more than 30 percent), it is very low in Niger and Uganda (less than 5 percent).13 But even this measure may overestimate the real influence of trade unions in the workforce, as a high proportion of workers in many countries are self-employed or not in the formal economy and may not be captured in the measures of union participation.
BOX 1.3 What brings happiness—having a job or something beyond it? What do we know about the ways in which work— beyond having a job—promotes happiness? Some types of work appear to be associated with happiness more than others, and the income gained through work is not the only thing that matters. One study of the relationship between different occupations and life satisfaction found a wide variation in satisfaction that did not directly correlate with income, with members of the clergy the most satisfied, followed closely by chief executives and senior officials and agricultural managers. The least satisfied were those working as bar managers, in lowskill construction jobs or as debt collectors.1 Notes 1. Easton 2014. 2. Helliwell and Huang 2011b. Source: Human Development Report Office.
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Much remains to be learned about the causes of happiness at work, although some factors are increasingly well accepted. For example, the relationship with one’s manager is important. Indeed, trust in the workplace generally seems to be an important factor. In Canada a one-third standard-deviation increase in trust in management did as much for happiness as an income increase of 31 percent. Job fit—having an opportunity at work to do what one does best—is also important for subjective well-being. Better job fit has been associated with higher life evaluations and better daily experiences in all seven regions of the world.2