Employment quality and employees’ health: evidence from an Internet survey in Japan

With the global rise in atypical work arrangements, understanding how employment quality affects workers' health has become an important academic and policy issue. This study investigates how employment quality is related to workers’ health by using data on Japanese employees collected through an Internet survey, and adopting a typological approach to measure employment quality. The analysis was conducted in two steps. First, a latent class cluster analysis was applied to a set of indicators that represent various components of employment quality identified in past studies (employment stability, material rewards, working time arrangements, training opportunities, collective organization, and interpersonal power relations) and employees in the sample were classified into indicator-based groups. Second, logistic regressions were conducted to examine whether and how the subjective health status and mental health status of employees vary among these groups after controlling for differences in employees’ demographic characteristics. The analysis identified five distinct groups, each representing different types of employment quality, and revealed the existence of health disparities among them. While the Japanese employment system, known for its well-developed internal labor markets, has motivated existing studies to focus mainly on differences in health outcomes between regular and non-regular employees, the findings of this study suggest the usefulness of the typological approach in capturing diverse patterns of employment quality experienced by Japanese workers and assessing how such patterns affect their health status.