8263829 Job quality and health in the European union: who gets the short end of the stick? a latent class analysis using EU-SILC

<h3>Objective</h3> High job quality can result in good work, which has a protective effect on physical and mental health outcomes. Our study aims to investigate the impact of job quality on self-rated general health, using a large EU population-representative dataset. <h3>Material and Methods</h3> We used ten waves of the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) survey, covering 2010-2019. Our sample was salaried workers aged 18-65 living in an EU country. Our exposure, job quality, was a latent variable constructed with three indicators: income from employment, weekly working hours and contract permanency. Our outcome was self-rated general health (Likert scale 1-5; 1 = excellent, 5 = very poor). We conducted a latent class analysis (LCA) of job quality, using generated latent classes to investigate the effects of higher and lower job quality on health. <h3>Results</h3> Our final analytical sample consisted of 1,318,430 individuals. We conducted exploratory and confirmatory LCAs, which indicated a four-class solution without measurement and covariate invariance was the best fit (BIC = 5938159, entropy = 0.85), after grouping by country and incorporating covariates. Based on item response probabilities, we created a class typification consisting of high-quality jobs (three classes: ‘Overworkers’, ‘Standard workers’, ‘Parttimers’) and low-quality jobs (one class: ‘Low job quality workers’). The covariate-adjusted estimates of our regression suggested that workers in low-quality jobs had a higher risk of being in very poor health (3.275 [0.018], p&lt;0.001), whilst those in high-quality jobs had a lower risk of poor health (-4.026 [0.012], p&lt;0.001). <h3>Conclusion</h3> Job quality disparities exist across Europe, impacting workers’ health. Our findings could inform and lead to changes in EU employment policies and working conditions, to improve the health of workers across the EU.