Low-Paid but Satisfied? How Immigrant and Ethnic Minority Workers in Low-Wage Jobs Make Sense of Their Wages

Abstract

A ‘good job’ consists of the concepts of wages as an economic compensation, job status as a social status, and job satisfaction as a subjective psychological criterion, and it represents individual accomplishments in the labour market in regard to workers’ entire life (Bang and Lee, 2006). Job satisfaction in particular depends on objective working conditions as well as subjective factors (among others, Easterlin, 2001; Frey and Stutzer, 2002 for a review; Diener et al., 1999; Clark and Oswald, 1994, 1996; Poggi, 2010). As a rule, jobs characterised by low wages and low status are associated with a low level of job satisfaction (Eurofound, 2013b). However, this is not always the case.