Job Satisfaction and Bad Jobs: Why Are Cleaners So Happy at Work?

an article by Alexandre Léné (Université de Lille, France) published in Work, Employment and Society Volume 33 Issue 4 (August 2019)

Abstract

Our analysis is based on the French DARES Working Conditions survey which contains a very large sample of individuals representative of the French working population. We demonstrate that employees working in the cleaning sector report significantly higher levels of satisfaction than the other employees. This statistical result is robust; it persists when we introduce a large number of control variables.

This result is puzzling insofar as it is generally agreed that these workers hold ‘poor quality’ jobs: low pay, an abnormal pattern of work, arduous working conditions.

We suggest that cleaners’ expectations and standards are influenced by an adaptation process. Their job satisfaction needs to be considered in the light of their past experience. Their employment history shapes their wants and needs and thus affects the way they evaluate their work.

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Care and Repair and the Politics of Urban Kindness

an article by Tom Hall and Robin James Smith (Cardiff University, UK) published in Sociology Volume 49 Number 1 (February 2015)

Abstract

This article considers the possibility that small acts of urban care, maintenance and cleaning might make for a good city.

This might seem a slim possibility, given the vast sociology of hopelessness to which the contemporary city is home. But it can also be argued that a politics, and a sociology, of hope are best looked for not in big picture or utopian thinking but in the practical instances of everyday care and kindness that are as much a part of the urban everyday as anxiety, insecurity and damage.

We explore this possibility through a critical assessment of Nigel Thrift’s recent writings on urban repair, drawing (but not reporting) on our own research with street cleaners and outreach workers tasked to look out for the rough sleeping homeless.

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