On 8 December 2023, Dr Lynette Washington presented the paper ‘Labour market preference of retrenched Australian auto industry workers for job quality and meaningful work’ at the Asian and Australasian Society of Labour Economics Conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The paper, which Dr Washington co-authored with Associate Professor Akshay Vij, Associate Professor Sally Weller, Mr Jacob Irving, and Associate Professor Ilke Onur, used Stated Preference (SP) experiments to examine the labour market preferences of 309 workers retrenched by the Australian automotive industry. In the experiment, we investigated non-pecuniary job attributes denoting job quality and meaningfulness to determine which attributes were most important to retrenched workers. The study found that autonomy and employer reputation for good work policies and practices were the two most important non-pecuniary job attributes, with compensating wage differentials of roughly $5 AUD per hour for greater autonomy and better employer reputation. Job security and skill utilisation were also important, but less so, with compensating wage differentials between $1 AUD and $3 AUD per hour for greater security and fewer training requirements. Overall, we found that workers’ strongest preference was not for a particular type of work, but rather for a particular type of employer, suggesting that labour market policy might pay more attention to regulating the quality of workplaces.
Find the presentation slide deck for this conference below.
For more information about the conference visit https://www.aasle.org/conferences.