Yahoo Finance, January 10th, 2010

Editor’s note:  An older article, but one that may apply to many of you nearing retirement, and even some who are not.

Job satisfaction in America hit a record low in 2009, according to a survey
released this week by the Conference Board — with only 45 percent of
workers reporting contentment with their jobs.

Clearly, the
economic downturn is partly to blame. Workers have lost their jobs and
taken less fulfilling, lower-paid positions. They’ve had to pick up the
slack when colleagues were laid off, managing bigger workloads with no
pay increase. They’ve had hours cut and benefits such as 401(k) matches
dropped.

But job satisfaction among all age and income groups has
been on a consistent downward trend since 1987, when the Conference
Board began tracking the numbers.

“What we’ve seen over last 22
years is that irrespective of whether the economy is boom or bust, the
overall level of satisfaction expressed by U.S. workers has been
steadily declining across every single aspect of the job,” says Lynn
Franco, director of the Conference Board’s Consumer Research Center and
author of the report.

Those aspects include wages, benefits, job
security, promotion policies, bonus plans, work load, work-life balance,
communication, potential for growth and recognition, among other
components of the job.

What’s Going On?

Part
of the problem is that people feel they can’t get ahead, Franco notes.
Household incomes, adjusted for inflation, have stagnated since 2000.
Meanwhile, out-of-pocket costs for health insurance have risen sharply:
The average annual worker contributions for single and family coverage
more than doubled over the last decade, to $779 and $3,515 respectively,
according to a 2009 Kaiser Family Foundation report.

“The
shifting of health-care costs from employer to employee and the fact
that wages haven’t been growing all that rapidly means purchasing power
is diminishing,” says Franco. At the same time, workers operate “in a
24/7 environment where pressures and stresses are greater.”

People
may be opting for the better-paid but less-rewarding gigs just to keep
pace with the cost of living, says Cornell economist Robert Frank,
author of “Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle
Class.”

“If you hold a person’s skills and experience constant,
there will be spectrum of jobs, and the ones that pay more will have
less desirable working conditions: less autonomy, more risk, less
variety in the workday” — a concept known as compensating wage
differentials, says Frank. “The economic logic is you can’t get people
to accept those jobs unless they pay more. If people are feeling more
(economic) pressure, they are more willing to sacrifice other dimensions
of job satisfaction in order to get more money.” (And a range of
studies shows that making money a primary goal can
lead to unhappiness.)

Part of the problem is the rise of
an uber-class over the last three decades, which has influenced both
the costs and aspirations of those of us who are, well, less uber,
Frank says. The top 10 percent — households earning more than $100,000
– collected 48.5 percent of all reported income in 2005, up from 33
percent in the 1970s and the largest share since just before the Great
Depression. The top 1 percent garnered 22 percent of all reported income
— double the share they received in 1980.

“People who are
taking higher-paying jobs because they are have a hard time making ends
meet aren’t have a hard time making ends meet by accident,” Frank
suggests. “It’s because to send your kid to an average school you have
to match what people like you spend on houses. If they are spending more
than they used to, then so do you.”

Read more of this article.