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Perceptions of Job Security in Europe’s Ageing Workforce

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Abstract

Using data from the 2004 Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, this paper investigates older workers’ perceptions of job security in eleven countries. We describe cross-national patterns and estimate multilevel models to analyse individual and societal determinants of self-perceived job security in the older labour force. While there are considerable cross-country variations around a median value of 23% of workers aged 50 or older ranking their job security as poor, none of our suggested macro-level explanatory variables—employment rate, employment protection legislation, mean level of general social trust, and proportion disapproving of working beyond age 70—bears statistically significant associations with individuals’ job security. We find some indication, however, that the various societal factors considered here might contribute jointly to explaining the observed cross-national variation. Future research should aim at identifying statistically more powerful indicators of the supposed multilevel relationship between social context and older workers’ perceptions of job security. Moreover, supplementary findings indicate that further attention should be paid to the gender dimension of job insecurity.

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Notes

  1. See Pichler and Wallace (2009) for related research investigating the reasons for differences in job satisfaction across Europe.

  2. Unfortunately, our data source does not cover any country representing a ‘liberal’ welfare state regime, such as the United Kingdom. However, a recent analysis of data from the European Social Survey suggests that the average level of self-perceived job security in the UK labour force is fairly close to the Continental European average (see Erlinghagen 2008: Table 1). That is, we are unlikely to miss one of the potentially very informative cases at the upper or lower end of the distribution (see Banks and Casanova 2003, as well as Whiting 2005, for overviews of older workers’ employment situation in the UK).

  3. Further potentially relevant country-level variables, such as the unemployment rate in the older population (economic reference frame), a measure of trust in political institutions (cultural reference frame), or the KOF index of social globalisation (social reference frame), were employed in a number of alternative estimations. These, however, did not provide a better fit than those models on which the analyses whose details we present here are based.

  4. In multilevel analysis, the higher-level sample size often constitutes a major restriction. The question of what constitutes a sufficient sample size for accurate estimation is thus an important issue. While the multilevel literature does not provide a definite answer to this question, the number of countries in our study clearly marks the minimum number of necessary group-level observations (cf. Snijders and Bosker 1999: 44; also see the critical discussion in Maas and Hox 2005).

  5. In a bivariate descriptive analysis of our composite social environment indicator (graphical details not shown here), Austria and Belgium exhibit the lowest scores (=3), whereas the three countries with the lowest proportions of older workers reporting poor job security—Sweden, Spain, and Denmark—score highest (≥5). Note that Greece and Italy are not considered here because of missing values.

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Acknowledgments

This paper is based on data from Release 2.0.1 of SHARE 2004. The SHARE data collection has been primarily funded by the European Commission through the 5th framework program (project QLK6-CT-2001-00360 in the thematic program ‘Quality of Life’). Additional funding came from the U.S. National Institute on Aging (U01 AG09740-13S2, P01 AG005842, P01 AG08291, P30 AG12815, Y1-AG-4553-01, and OGHA 04-064). Data collection in Austria (through the Austrian Science Fund, FWF), Belgium (through the Belgian Science Policy Office), and Switzerland (through BBW/OFES/UFES) was nationally funded. Further support by the European Commission through the 6th framework program (Project RII-CT-2006-062193, SHARE-I3) is gratefully acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany

    Karsten Hank

  2. University of Duisburg-Essen, Duisburg, Germany

    Marcel Erlinghagen

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  1. Karsten Hank
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  2. Marcel Erlinghagen
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Correspondence to Karsten Hank.

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Hank, K., Erlinghagen, M. Perceptions of Job Security in Europe’s Ageing Workforce. Soc Indic Res 103, 427–442 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-010-9710-8

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