AEI Public Opinion Study: The State of the American Worker, 2018

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The State of the American Worker is a compilation of polls on workers’ attitudes about their jobs that we update annually to coincide with Labor Day. It is one of a series of AEI’s Public Opinion Studies, which aim to provide a comprehensive picture of public opinion on a single topic by comparing various pollsters’ questions and trends over time.

The first section of this study examines Americans’ feelings about their jobs overall – their general job satisfaction, how that compares to satisfaction with other aspects of their lives, whether people want a different job than the one they currently have, and what their job means to them. Next, we look at measures of job anxiety, views of the job market, and concerns about outsourcing and automation. The third section explores workers’ satisfaction with specific aspects of their jobs. In the following section, we look at what aspects of work matter most to people when they think about the type of job they want. We then turn to questions about experiences with different types of work-related discrimination. The final sections of the study focus on feelings about the balance between work and family life, questions about work characteristics that describe workers’ day-to-day experience, perceptions of worker/employee loyalty, and views of leisure time.

Credit: Twenty20

Key points

• Job satisfaction is high and stable. Twenty-five years ago, when Gallup first asked employed adults about their jobs, 87 percent were satisfied. When Gallup asked the identical question in 2017, 92 percent were satisfied. In the National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Survey, 85 percent were satisfied with the work they did in 1972; in 2016, a virtually identical 88 percent were. In Gallup’s 2017 survey, more than 9 in 10 workers were satisfied with their relations with coworkers, the flexibility of their hours, and their job security. Satisfaction with earnings is generally lower, but it is still high. In 2017, 30 percent were completely satisfied with the amount of money they earned, and 48 percent were somewhat satisfied.

• Work means more than just a paycheck. When Pew asked working adults in a 2016 survey which of two different ways of looking at one’s job best described how they felt, 57 percent said their job provided them a sense of identity, compared to 40 percent who said their job was just what they did for a living. Large majorities of Americans (70 percent in NORC’s 2016 General Social Survey) say they would enjoy having a paying job even if they didn’t need the money. Income and benefits clearly matter, but when people are asked about what they consider important in a job, nonmonetary factors like having an interesting job and being able to make a contribution to society rank above high income.

• The high anxiety that followed the financial crash has mostly disappeared. To take one example, 31 percent of workers in Gallup’s August 2009 survey said they worried they would be laid off, up from 15 percent in 2008. In 2016 and 2017, 19 percent of workers worried they would be laid off. Fifty-seven percent in Gallup’s April 2010 survey said that if they were laid off, it was not too or not at all likely that they would find a job as good as the one they had. In 2016, 63 percent said it was very or somewhat likely that they would be able to find as good a job. Fifty percent told Pew in October last year that there were plenty of jobs available in their community, up from a low of 10 percent in March 2010.