Job Quality Changes, Timing, and Consequences

Abstract

Research on inequalities in the labor market often focuses on wages. In this dissertation, I examine another important aspect of employment: job quality. In the U.S. policy context, the primary way that individuals and families access critical benefits such as medical insurance and paid time off is through employers – thus, I use term “employer-provided benefits” interchangeably with “job quality.” Access to employer-provided benefits is important for individual and family health, economic security, and for managing work-family commitments. Benefits are especially important for women who, on average, have greater care obligations than men. I use data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth, 1979 and 1997 cohorts, to examine trends and inequalities in access to employer-provided benefits. The NLSY79 and NLSY97 are the only longitudinal surveys to collect detailed annual or biennial data on respondents’ employment history as well as several measures of job quality. These studies are ideally suited for trend analyses, because the NLSY97 was designed for comparability with the NLSY79. In Chapter Two, I use causal methods to estimate the effect of employer-provided benefits on transitioning from employed in one year to not employed in the next year. For this chapter, I include five employer-provided benefits that previous scholars have identified as potentially important for employment. I show that several employer-provided benefits are strong predictors of remaining employed. Further, the number of benefits employees have access to has a substantial impact on the gender gap in remaining employed. In Chapter Three, I examine employer-provided benefits’ decline in the context of increases in educational attainment and gender inequality. I ask, did women’s greater increases in postsecondary education relative to men protect them from benefits decline? I show that women’s job quality declined similarly to men’s job quality despite women’s greater educational increases. I also find that while the positive association between education and benefits remained stable over time for men and women, the positive association between wages and job quality substantially increased for women. Since women continue to earn less than men the change in the association between women’s wages and job quality undercut the protective value of women’s increased educational attainment. In Chapter Four, I examine how the timing of women’s access to medical insurance and parental leave aligns (or misaligns) with the timing of births. I show that regardless of how educated women become and no matter how long they wait to have children, the majority do not have access to employer-provided medical insurance and parental leave when they give birth to their first child. In addition, I show how racialized/ethnic differences in educational attainment and timing of first births contribute to racialized/ethnic inequalities in access to benefits. Taken together, these dissertation papers illustrate the importance of employer-provided benefits for employment stability (and gendered employment inequalities), the declining availability of these benefits (despite rising educational attainment, particularly among women), and the large inequalities in their availability across expectant mothers. There are simply not enough good jobs for even the most highly educated: jobs that provide the benefits necessary for all men and women to enjoy economic stability and to manage their personal and family commitments.