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	    <p>According to a new study, having a badly paid job can be worse for one's mental health than having no job at all. A <a href="http://oem.bmj.com/content/early/2011/02/26/oem.2010.059030.full.pdf" title="Occupational Environmental Medicine">team of researchers in Australia</a> found, as expected, that in general unemployed people have worse mental health than those in work. However, merely moving into work did not lead to an improvement, and the transition from unemployment to low-quality work worsened mental health. Instead, the job had to be of a certain level of "psychosocial quality" to be beneficial, meaning it had to be relatively secure, that the pay was perceived to be fair, that work demands were not excessive, and that people could exert some influence over when and how their work was done.</p><p>Over the decades – from pioneering investigations in Austria in the 1930s through to case studies of Thatcherism's victims in the 1980s – researchers have found that joblessness carries a singular psychological burden that appears to occur independently of financial hardship. Work provides time structures to the day, it obliges participation in shared activities, and it generates status and identity. Without it, people and places often go to pieces: apathy sets in, simple tasks take longer, there is less social contact and what little money there is goes on luxuries before necessities. Work is good for our health – the greatest influence over human happiness after love and friendship.</p><p>But this new report found that people stuck in poorly paying, tightly controlled jobs and subject to externally imposed targets had much poorer mental health scores than those who saw their pay as fairer and their autonomy as higher.</p><p>Take call centres. Being told to follow a digital pre-script and having to ask to go to the toilet is a qualitatively different experience than being able to use your own initiative. As expected, one might think. But the significance is in the political implications.</p><p>Countries with "work-first" policies may not necessarily increase wellbeing. In dedicating themselves single-mindedly to the quantity of jobs in a society, policymakers ignore the critical social and psychological importance of the quality of jobs. Only when the work is decent does psychological health improve.</p><p>Such a message is, of course, particularly relevant in Britain – though unfortunately most of it will go unheard. Under the slogan of "making work pay", the coalition aims to incentivise the workless to take work, arguing that doing so will help the life chances of individuals and families. The blind spot is in imagining any job will do. The evidence suggests it won't.</p><p>The stories of people being circulated from benefits into low-grade, temporary work and back to benefits again rather defeats the object of the policy. Meanwhile, many people complain they are trapped in repetitive jobs from which the prospect of moving up or improving skills is severely restricted by competitive pressures, suggesting political hopes invested in having work are on the optimistic side.</p><p>Britain has a respectable record in creating professional and managerial jobs in recent decades (many in the public sector). But alongside this has been growth in low-paying service jobs in care, catering, security and so on – the so-called hourglass labour market. Some 10 million people – more than a third of the labour force – earn less than £15,000 a year. Meanwhile, some aspects of job quality have deteriorated appreciably. All occupational groups report a reduction in their autonomy and an increase in their stress and insecurity.</p><p>Faced with the challenge of job quality there is a tendency among politicians to think not much can be done, aside from attempting to encourage growth so that people can change jobs if they want to. Admittedly, subtle issues of autonomy and stress do not lend themselves to quick regulatory fixes. Yet, as the Australian study points out, job quality has historically been an area where political intervention has brought far-reaching social advances – for example through minimum wages or laws on working time. The absurdity of our current situation lies in imagining that the nature of work is now a political and social irrelevance so long as jobs exist.</p><p></p><p>• This article was commissioned after being suggested by <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/discussion/user/joemccann" title="">JoeMcCann</a>. If you have a subject you would like to see covered by Comment is free, please visit our <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/17/you-tell-us" title="You tell us page">You tell us page</a></p>&#13;
    </div></div><p><strong>Read more:</strong> <a class="rssreadon" rel="external" title="Jobs are not enough: it's the quality of work that counts | Stephen Overell" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/17/jobs-work-coalition-quality-of-life" target="_blank">http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/17/jobs-work-coalition-quality-of-life</a></p>