Workers ’ evaluations in five countries

job? These are questions that everyone has asked or been asked. They are important questions, because they go to the heart of the issues of job quality and personal welfare. One direct way to evaluate the extent to which jobs are good or bad is to rely on the opinions of workers by asking them about their own job satisfaction. Understanding job quality is indeed important for several reasons. First, careful evaluation of labour market policies requires that account be taken of their effects on all aspects of employ-ment, not merely wages and employment levels. In this respect, the value of job satisfaction data stems from the existence of subjective, but important, aspects of the employment relationship, coupled with the near impossibility of measuring all the objective characteristics of a job. And even if measurement difficulties could be overcome, measure-ments of each characteristic would then need to be combined in order to create what economists call a utility index. In constructing such a