Don’t worry, be flexible? Job satisfaction among flexible workers

Abstract

This paper investigates whether workers in flexible employment relationships show lower job satisfaction than workers with permanent job contracts. Our results show that looking only at the formal job security provided by the contract may lead to misleading conclusions about job satisfaction. We find, using longitudinal data for Germany, that it is not the formal job security provided by the contractual agreement but rather the perceived job security that matters for job satisfaction. Moreover, our results indicate that workers value job char-acteristics in similar ways across fundamentally different types of job contracts.