What has happened to job quality in Britain? The effect of different weighting methods on labour market inequalities and changes using a UK Quality of Work (QoW) index, 2012–2021

There has been a growth in the use of multidimensional job quality indices, yet the job quality agenda has had a limited impact on public policymaking. This has partly been attributed to disagreements over how to measure job quality and, in particular, weight different indicators of indices. A further reason is a tendency to use international indices, which lack the sample size to explore important country-level inequalities in job quality. To address these issues, this paper presents findings from four different weighting methods for a new synthetic index of the Quality of Work (QoW) for the United Kingdom, using data from a large national survey (Understanding Society). The UK QoW Index contains 7 dimensions and 15 indicators. Several novel indicators argued to be particularly important to the UK context are developed, including health & safety and long-term job prospects. The paper defaults to a widely-used equal weighting approach informed by the Alkire-Foster method, but simultaneously presents findings using alternative hedonic, frequency-based and data-driven weighting methods. The paper then analyses inequalities and changes in job quality from 2012 to 2021; and differences in job quality by type of employment (self-employed, platform labour or gig economy), previous employment status (prior unemployment spell), sex, age, ethnicity and region, according to these four weighting methods. Save for hedonic weighting, these show a broad consistency in many of the key findings: namely, inequalities in job quality between most of the same sub-groups; and a growing polarisation in job quality between employees and self-employed workers.