On the Quality of Employment in the European Union

Abstract

Job quality represents a fundamental objective within the EU employment policy agenda, which allows for assessing the labor market performance. The high work intensity, increase in temporary work, deterioration of working conditions, and increasing competition in the labor market have caused the decline of employment quality in the EU over the last decades. The paper highlights the importance of considering job quality as a dimension of the quality of employment services. To capture this new dimension, the paper proposes a set of job quality indicators, which are taken and adapted from the set of Laeken indicators. This new multidimensional approach allows measuring job quality, which itself represents a fundamental dimension of the quality of employment services.