Non standard employment and quality of work: towards new forms of measurement

This Chapter deals with the issue of measuring quality according to the subjective perception that each single worker has of it. The article starts out from the definition put forward by Gallino (1993), who identifies four dimensions of the quality of labour (ergonomic, of complexity, of autonomy and of control), analysing it and integrating it with two other dimensions: the relational/social dimension of work bound up in the need for social recognition and the dimension of compatibility between working/ living time/conditions. In the analysis of the social dimension, attention is placed on the network of relationships that a specific job manages to activate both within the workplace and outside. The reconciliation dimension makes it possible to verify the compatibility of working commitment with personal and family life. Thus in the essay, a measuring method is put forward, articulated across the six dimensions, which groups together about 50 elementary indicators into synthetic indexes of various levels, exploiting fuzzy logic based on a previous model proposed in Addabbo, Facchinetti, Mastroleo and Solinas (2007). This tool makes it possible to clarify the interaction between the worker’s perception of the various dimensions that make up the quality and the remunerative/contractual characteristics of the job.