12 October 2007

are better educated workers happier?

i recently started a new blog--in spanish--which is a bit more "serious" than this one:

http://contrarreplica.blogspot.com

my friend james seemed a bit disappointed that it was in spanish, so i used some free online translation thingie to translate this into english and made a few editorial changes... here it is (and i apologize for what may be translated quite literally):

A few months ago I started working with a colleague on a research project on happiness and job satisfaction for which we use a database of unionized workers in Japan. One of the results of our study is that people with higher levels of education are more satisfied in their jobs and happier in their lives in general. This applies to people with masters, technical and doctoral degrees--that is, those education levels beyond high school. Workers who have no high school degree but who have completed middle school are also pretty satisfied at work and in their personal lives--although not as much as those people with higher degrees. What explains this relationship between the educational level of a person and his job satisfaction?

The answer is not simple. In other countries, the relationship between these two variables is in fact very different. In the United States, for example, the association is simple: higher education is correlated with greater satisfaction. If we think that better education brings about more attractive and better-paid job opportunities, this makes sense: with a better salary we can buy a better car, a larger house, we can offer a better quality of life for our families, and we will be more satisfied in general.

However, although a better job generally offers higher wages, it also implies greater responsibilities, longer hours at work and less with the family. In fact, what happens in Britain is the opposite of what occurs in the United States: British workers with higher degrees tend to report lower satisfaction levels! Andrew Clark explains this finding with his "aspiration hypothesis," a theory that says that those who are better educated, tend to have higher aspirations--although this does not imply that all of them achieve their goals. This is the typical case of the taxi driver who has an accounting degree... or perhaps less drastic, the case of a management major working at a company where he is never promoted because vacancies in top positions are limited.

So far, I have not found other research to conclude what is the underlying cause of this connection between education and job satisfaction or personal happiness. The interesting thing is that Japanese workers with a high school degree are the most unhappy, while workers with master's and doctoral degrees are more satisfied. The question remains, however... Why?

I still don't have an answer to this question although I do have a conjecture. Talking with my co-author and reading articles on the internet, I realized that status or the social position of a person in Japan is very important. A reputed Japanese-American scholar, Edwin Reischauer, wrote in the 50s that hierarchies are very significant in Japanese life: these hierarchies show precisely, for example, in the visible respect for the elderly or the predominant role of men--and the corresponding backlog of women--in the professional field. Similarly, it is possible to think that those who have a college degree, or even better, a master's or doctorate degree, derive a great deal of satisfaction out of the pure pleasure of being in a higher position in Japan's socio-academic-cultural scale.

However, another interesting cultural issue is that there is a lot of competition and pressure amongst Japanese workers, especially those with higher levels of education and better job positions. This intense competition among co-workers is reflected in the high suicide rates prevalent in the country--the highest among industrialized nations and the 8th highest in the world according to Wikipedia. As if this were not bad enough, suicide is not the only social issue caused by this insane desire to excel and be the best amongst their peers. Since the 60s, there has been a significant increase in the number of claims by families of workers who have died from overwork. This has become such a common issue in Japan that a term has been coined to refer to these deaths from overwork: karoshi. At the same time, the Japanese government has recently proposed reforms to current standard labor laws, which have failed to regulate the number of hours worked or even the appropriate compensation terms that employees must receive in return for their extra hours at work (in fact, one additional problem is that workers, especially the young, choose not to report overtime out of fear of retaliation by their superiors).

How do these policies affect employee satisfaction? We still don't know... But in the meantime, you can read some more puzzling info on this matter:

http://members.jcom.home.ne.jp/katori/WORKAHOLISM.html
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Japan/IF02Dh01.html