TOWARDS A 'WORK INDEX' OF WELLBEING: RECENTRING WORK IN ANALYSES OF INEQUALITY

Abstract

This thesis investigates how the quality of work can and should be determined to allow for analyses of interpersonal, intertemporal, and (inter)national wellbeing inequalities. Marxist, feminist, and environmental approaches to political economy have criticised the centrality of GDP in such analyses due to its shortcomings in accounting for the complexity of human and planetary wellbeing. Intersecting crises of capitalism, including the climate crisis, the crisis of care, and rising authoritarianism, require a fundamental theoretical and methodological shift away from dominant understandings of work in policymaking and research. The central argument of this thesis is that work, if defined appropriately, is not merely causally related to wellbeing but constitutive of it, meaning that wellbeing inequalities cannot be sufficiently understood without an analysis of work. While there are rich bodies of scholarship on the quality of working life, these frequently equate 'work' with 'paid, formalised employment', thereby perpetuating assumptions about wellbeing as closely tied to GDP, growth, and productivity. Instead of narrow measures of income, this thesis proposes the quality of work, including inequalities such as those related to rewards, recognition, or meaningfulness, be used as a central foundation for policymaking. This requires a tool capturing the multidimensionality of work, such as a 'work index' of wellbeing, which operates with a broad definition of 'work'. This thesis contributes to the development of such a tool by exploring how the quality of 'work', including unpaid activities such as household work or volunteering, can and should be assessed. To facilitate conversation about work activities regardless of their degree of formality, I developed a multidimensional conceptual framework of work quality. I applied this framework and used exploratory analysis to establish whether a 'work index' of wellbeing could be built using secondary data from established surveys on work. Quantitative analysis of the UK Labour Force Survey as well as the European Working Conditions Survey revealed that these surveys are systematically incapable of capturing especially the quality of unpaid work. A potential 'work index' based on these surveys would consequently fall short of the aim of capturing 'work' instead of 'formal employment' alone, rendering it inadequate for rigorous analyses of inequality. To explore how unpaid activities could be included in work-related research and policymaking, I held qualitative discussion panels of working people in both paid and unpaid work, consulting them on how the quality of their work should be measured and trialling the conceptual framework I developed. In conjunction with findings from expert interviews, I analysed the qualitative data from panels to explore how work analysis could become inclusive of different working people and their multidimensional experiences, including how exchange between researchers, policymakers, and working people could be enhanced. Together, these findings contribute to a necessary transformation of research and policymaking towards a (re)centring of work by paving the way for more rigorous analyses of work quality. As an additional research output beyond the thesis, I created a website which provides an overview over my research and compiles a range of interactive resources for researchers, policymakers, and working people themselves. This website was created with financial support from the Sustainable Consumption Institute at the University of Manchester. For more information, visit the following page: https://work-quality.com/en/

Date of Award	1 Aug 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	John O'Neill (Supervisor) & Sherilyn MacGregor (Supervisor)