https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6654-7530
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ABSTRACT
Most comparative studies of job autonomy and learning opportunities find that workers in Scandinavian countries are better off. Recent studies have challenged these findings, showing low job quality, particularly in the lower private service sector in the Scandinavian countries. The aim of this article is to examine whether the autonomous and learning-intensive working life of Scandinavia also applies to people without higher education. It explores if there is a gap in job autonomy and informal job learning between educational groups, and if this gap varies across the social democratic systems of Sweden, Norway and Denmark on the one hand, and the liberal systems of the United Kingdom and Ireland on the other. Drawing on quantitative micro-data from PIAAC (2011/2012), this article demonstrates that Scandinavians with no education above upper secondary school do experience greater job autonomy than their counterparts in the British Isles. Moreover, the gap between educational groups in terms of job autonomy is smaller in Scandinavia than it is in the liberal systems. Regarding informal learning opportunities, the relative disadvantage among workers without higher education seems to be associated with selection into occupations with few opportunities for informal job learning, in Scandinavia as well as the British Isles.
Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this manuscript was presented at the 2017 ILPC conference in Sheffield. I am thankful for the helpful comments made by several of the participants. I would also like to thank Gunn Elisabeth Birkelund, Emily Murphy, the rest of the research group at Fafo and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Tove Mogstad Aspøy is a PhD candidate at the department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo, Norway and a researcher at Fafo Institute for Labour and Social Research, Oslo, Norway. Her research interests focus on workplace learning, skills, vocational education and training and job quality
ORCID
Tove Mogstad Aspøy http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6654-7530
Notes
1 This is opposed to production regime theory, such as varieties of capitalism (Hall and Soskice Citation2001), which focuses on the role of employers’ decisions.
2 Neither the centralisation of bargaining nor the degree of bargaining coordination, important in the production regime framework, have a significant effect on job control or the difference in job control between occupation groups (Gallie Citation2011).
3 This is especially the case in Sweden. In Norway, the union density in the private sector is relatively low (Andersen et al. Citation2014).
4 See Appendix 1, and A2. Factor analyses were calculated with pooled data. Country-wise factor analyses yielded similar results.
5 Unfortunately, there is no way to separate learning from co-workers from learning from supervisors in the PIAAC data.
6 ISCED 1–3c short is labelled lower secondary school, and ISCED 3A, 3B and 3C long are labelled upper secondary school. In the UK, adults with ISCED 1–3c short include no formal qualifications and lower level qualifications such as Entry Level, Basic Skills qualifications or fewer than five GCSEs. ISCED 3A, 3B and 3C long include five or more GCSEs, BTEC level 2 or 3 qualifications, and A level (BIS Research Paper number 139, p. 79–80; Technical Report of the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC)). In this study, upper secondary school comprises general and vocational studies, as a distinction is not available for Ireland. Although this categorization does not grasp the complexity of each country's education system, I will argue that it meets the requirements for an adequate comparison across countries, in line with Schneider (Citation2010).
7 ISCED 4C.
8 Schneider (Citation2010) states that ISCED 4C and 5B are often interchangeable across countries. For the purposes of this study, these categories are grouped with ISCED 5A and 6. See also footnote 13 and 17.
9 ‘Sector’ is chosen over ‘industry’ as it gave similar results and explained variance.
10 OLS regression generally shows cross-national similarities in level of job autonomy within occupations: ‘Plant and machine operators’ experience relatively little autonomy. ‘Managers’ and ‘technicians’ generally exhibit relatively high levels of autonomy, as does ‘professionals’. ‘Plant and machine operators’ and ‘elementary occupations’ experience relatively little learning across countries.
11 Data did not include information on union density.
12 All analyses were performed with the prefix ‘repest’, accounting for complex survey data with weights and the plausible value methodology used in PIAAC (Von Davier et al. Citation2009). Models were compared using Wald's F-test, using the Stata prefix ‘svyset’ (probability weights included).
13 ISCED 4C prevalence in %: Sweden 0.9, Norway 9.5, Denmark 1.3, UK 0 and Ireland 17.9. ISCED 5B prevalence in %: Sweden 9.6, Norway 5.7, Denmark 25.2, UK 14.4 and Ireland 17.9.
14 The variable ‘occupation’ represents the greatest impact in both 2a and 2b (Wald-tested).
15 Independently of choice of reference category in the variables ‘occupation’ and ‘public’.
16 Interaction between occupation and education improves model 2a and 2b, but estimates are generally not significant. Interaction between public sector and occupation was significant in the UK. Interaction between occupation and country was significant for autonomy, but without changing the estimates of explanatory variables.
17 Robustness checks show that analyses with ISCED 4C and ISCED 5B in one separate category, yield approximately similar results (a difference of around 0.1 SD). As expected, the difference between lower/upper secondary school and higher education is somewhat larger in Ireland.