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To examine objective measures of economic job quality for a broad sample of workers in the US spectator sports industry and compare job quality in spectator sports to other industries.

Logistic and linear regressions are performed on American Community Survey (ACS) data collected from 2015 to 2019. Earnings and employer provision of health insurance are the outcomes.

Earnings and employer-provided health insurance are lower in the spectator sports industry than in other industries after controlling for relevant factors. Differences are partly explained by the occupational composition of the industry and the higher incidence of part-time work. Many but not all occupational groups have lower earnings and less employer-provided health insurance in sports.

ACS data only reports one job, so the results likely underestimate the prevalence of part-time work in the US spectator sports industry. The study finds support for a micro-class occupational composition effect and a pulsating organization effect. Some support is also found for a sports industry compensating wage differential, but the effect is not industry wide, counter to some depictions.

This is the first study to examine objective, economic measures of job quality across all occupational sub-groups in the sports industry. This is the first study to propose theoretical explanations for poor economic job quality in sport.

Multiple jobholding (MJH) is assumed to be a growing phenomenon due to working life changes. This study presents new knowledge on the MJH career paths, from the perspectives of both employers and employees.

The qualitative interview study was focused on retail trade and restaurant and food service industries in Finland, where MJH is a quite common work arrangement compared to other European countries. The data were analyzed with the concepts of the chaos theory of careers and with an abductive thematic content analysis.

According to the results, several events and intertwined factors may lead individual careers gradually to MJH. Changing personal and family situations and leisure time needs attracted the careers towards MJH. MJH was not only a financial necessity to employees, but it also served their flexibility interests. The interviewed employers applied flexible non-standard employment arrangements mainly due to rapidly varying labor needs established in the industries. It was important for them to strengthen the non-standard core employees' sense of belonging to the work community. However, employees with work ability challenges were in risk to end up in peripheral positions at the labor market.

Previous research on multiple jobholding has not combined employers’ perspectives of MJH to employees’ experiences of career paths.

This chapter focuses on the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on the recognition through discourses of essentiality, of low-status workers and more specifically of care aides as an occupational group that performs society’s ‘dirty work’. The pandemic appears as a privileged moment to challenge the normative hegemony of how work is valued within society. However, public recognition through political discourse is a necessary but insufficient element in producing social change. Based on the theory of performativity, this chapter empirically probes conditions and mechanisms that enable a transition from discourse of essentiality to substantive recognition of the work performed by care aides in healthcare organizations. The authors rely on three main sources of data: scientific-scholarly works, documents from government, various associations and unions, and popular media reports published between February 2020 and 1 July 2022. While discourse of essentiality at the highest level of politics is associated with rapid policy response to value the work of care aides, it is embedded in a system structure and culture that restrains the establishment of substantive policy that recognizes the nature, complexity, and societal importance of care aide work. The chapter contributes to the literature on performativity by demonstrating the importance of the institutionalization of competing logics in contemporary health and social care systems and how it limits the effectiveness of discourse in promulgating new values and norms and engineering social change.

Entrepreneurial exit research has overlooked the unique context of exits at retirement age when an exit marks the end of an entrepreneurial career (i.e. retirement). To better understand retirement exit decisions and transitions, this study introduces the concept of work ability (i.e. an individual’s ability to meet work demands) into the entrepreneurial exit literature and, based on role theory, hypothesises its effect and interaction with general life satisfaction in explaining the entrepreneurial exits to retirement. The study clarifies the dynamics between the voluntary and non-voluntary aspects behind exit to retirement.

The authors use mixed-effects ordinal logistic regression with four-wave panel data on 198 Finnish small business entrepreneurs who intend to retire to test hypotheses on the relationship between work ability, general life satisfaction and entrepreneurial exit to retirement.

The study provides partial support for the hypothesis that work ability negatively impacts entrepreneurial exit to retirement and strong support for the idea that this effect is affected by general life satisfaction. Entrepreneurs who experience higher life satisfaction are likely to retire on their own terms, whereas those less satisfied continue working until declining work ability forces them to retire.

The study contributes to the entrepreneurial exit literature by showing how the exit dynamics unfold in the unique context of entrepreneurial exit to retirement. The theoretical discussion opens up the potential psychological mechanisms behind such dynamics.

Organizational scholars studying compensation often place an emphasis on certain employee groups (e.g., executives). Missing from this discussion is research on the compensation systems for low-wage jobs. In this review, the authors argue that workers in low-wage jobs represent a unique employment group in their understanding of rent allocation in organizations. The authors address the design of compensation strategies in organizations that lead to different outcomes for workers in low-wage jobs versus other workers. Drawing on and integrating human resource management (HRM), inequality, and worker literatures with compensation literature, the authors describe and explain compensation systems for low-wage work. The authors start by examining workers in low-wage work to identify aspects of these workers’ jobs and lives that can influence their health, performance, and other organizationally relevant outcomes. Next, the authors explore the compensation systems common for this type of work, building on the compensation literature, by identifying the low-wage work compensation designs, proposing the likely explanations for why organizations craft these designs, and describing the worker and organizational outcomes of these designs. The authors conclude with suggestions for future research in this growing field and explore how organizations may benefit by rethinking their approach to compensation for low-wage work. In sum, the authors hope that this review will be a foundational work for those interested in investigating organizational compensation issues at the intersection of inequality and worker and organizational outcomes.

This paper analyzes the differential experiences of women in the Canadian labour market who hold lower-skilled jobs and have school-age children during two waves of Covid compared with more typical conditions pre-pandemic. The article seeks to test the hypothesis that workers at the intersection of womanhood, motherhood and precarious employment would endure even more disadvantageous labour market outcomes during the Covid pandemic than they did prior to it.

We employ a Gender-Based Plus (GBA+) and intersectionality lens to examine the differential effect of Covid on the effect of the trifecta of being a woman in a lower-skilled job and facing a motherhood penalty from school-age children. We use a Difference-in-Difference framework with Canadian Labour Force Survey (LFS) data to examine the differential effect of two waves of Covid on three labour market outcomes: employment, hours worked and hourly wages.

We find that being a woman in a lower-skilled job with school-age children is associated with lower employment, hours worked and wages in normal times compared to males in those same situations. Such women also face the most severe adjustment consequence from the Covid shock, with that adjustment concentrated on the margin of employment and restricted to the First Wave and not the subsequent Omicron Wave.

The paper studies a specific intersectional group, assesses pre-pandemic, peak-pandemic and late-pandemic differences in labour market outcomes and runs separate estimations for different job skill levels. We also study a more comprehensive list of labour market outcomes than most studies of a similar nature.

It is inherent in human nature to pursue a fulfilling life. The art-of-living approach provides strategies to help individuals attain higher well-being. Based on current research approaches on the art-of-living, we aimed to develop, implement and evaluate an online training that enhances art-of-living and well-being scores of flight attendants.

The training focused on six art-of-living components – self-knowledge, savoring, bodily care, coping with events, positive attitude toward life and serenity. In total, 94 participants were randomly assigned to 3-day (n = 34) or 9-day (n = 30) training groups or to 2 corresponding control groups (CGs) (n = 30). Art-of-living and well-being were measured using self-reported questionnaires at pre-intervention, post-intervention and two-week follow-up.

Results showed significant pre-post differences in art-of-living and well-being scores in both experimental groups, while scores for the CGs remained stable across assessments. Intervention effects were sustained over the two-week follow-up period. We found no significant differences in efficacy between the shorter and longer training, suggesting that brief training can be effective.

These results demonstrate that well-being can be enhanced through online art-of-living training, which is promising in terms of the practical implementation of such training in resource-constrained work environments.

The presented, conducted and evaluated work intervention represents the first study to apply the multi-component approach of “art-of-living” in an online setting, comparing two trainings of varying durations. This approach offers a framework perfectly suited for future implementation in flight attendants’ work settings to increase well-being and a possible subsequent implementation in other professional groups that would benefit from online training (e.g. in a hybrid work context).

This paper presents the findings of assessing the strategies required for improved work-life balance (WLB) of construction workers in Eswatini. This was done to improve the work-life relationship of construction workers and, in turn, improve the service delivery of the construction industry in the country.

The study adopted a quantitative research approach using a questionnaire administered to construction professionals in the country. The data gathered were analysed using frequency, percentage, Mann–Whitney U test, exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA).

The findings revealed that the level of implementation of WLB initiatives in the Eswatini construction industry is still low. Following the attaining of several model fitness, the study found that the key strategies needed for effective WLB can be classified into four significant components, namely: (1) leave, (2) health and wellness, (3) work flexibility, and; (4) days off/shared work.

The findings offer valuable benefits to construction participants as the adoption of the identified critical strategies can lead to the fulfilment of WLB of the construction workforce and by extension, the construction industry can benefit from better job performance.

This study is the first to assess the strategies needed for improved WLB of construction workers in Eswatini. Furthermore, the study offers a theoretical platform for future discourse on WLB in Eswatini, a country that has not gained significant attention in past WLB literature.

Public health measures implemented early in the COVID-19 pandemic brought the idea of essential work into the public discourse, as the public reflected upon what types of work are essential for society to function, who performs that work, and how the labour of essential workers is rewarded. This chapter focusses on the rewards associated with essential work. The authors develop an intersectional lens on work that was officially deemed essential in 2020 to highlight longstanding patterns of devaluation among essential workers, including those undergirded by systemic racism in employment and labour law. The authors use quantitative data from the CPS-MORG to examine earnings differences between essential and non-essential workers and investigate whether the essential worker wage gap changed from month to month in 2020. The authors find that patterns of valuation among essential workers cannot be explained by human capital or other standard labour market characteristics. Rather, intersectional wage inequalities in 2020 reflect historical patterns that are highly durable and did not abate in the first year of the global pandemic.

Australian physiotherapy programs incorporate work-integrated learning within curriculum, with the aim to produce work-ready graduates. Recent research in physiotherapy has identified six domains of work readiness. The purpose of this study was to examine the association between university performance, paid work and work readiness, and explore the perceived contributions of university curriculum, work and life experiences to work readiness in those individuals transitioning into practice.

A mixed-methods design was used incorporating an online survey, and linked university performance data of completing students and recent graduates. The survey included personal and work data, a work readiness scale and Likert scales measuring perceived contributions to work readiness from university curriculum (academic and clinical), work and life experiences. University performance was calculated as the Course Weighted Average Mark. Correlation analysis examined the relationship between university performance, paid work and work readiness. Perceived contributions from university curriculum, and work and life experiences for work readiness domains were calculated as percentages of each Likert response.

Analysis included 129 surveys (51 completing students and 78 recent graduates). There was no association between university performance, work (paid and unpaid) and perceived work readiness (all p-values > 0.05). There was a high consistent trend that university academic curriculum (range 71–97%), clinical curriculum (range 89–99%) and work and life experiences (range 67–94%) contributed to all work readiness domains.

This study highlights the significant influence of university curriculum, work and life experiences on perceived readiness for practice.