People who are happy at work

a post in the Touchstone blog from the TUC by Nigel Stanley (Head of Campaigns and Communications, TUC)

This is the third post about the recent YouGov poll on attitudes to work commissioned by the TUC. YouGov used sophisticated statistical techniques to divide the workforce into five groups based on similar patterns of responses.

The cluster analysis identifies two groups distinguished by positive attitudes to aspects of their work. We look at the “happy with their job” group (22 per cent of the total) and the “happy with their pay” group (19 per cent of the workforce) together in this post as the differences between the two make some interesting points.

The ‘happy about their job’ group are more female, older and more likely to be white collar than the workforce as a whole. The ‘happy with their pay’ group are almost a mirror image of the former group (so while those in the ‘happy about their job’ group are more likely to be women, those in the ‘happy about their pay’ group are more likely to be men). This chart shows this mirror effect. (These charts show the difference from the sample as a whole – in other words if men made up the same proportion of a group as they did of the working population as a whole then the difference would be zero. As we can see the ‘happy about pay’ group is nearly 6 per cent more male than the population as a whole.)

Continue reading and see some interesting graphs