The changing face of public sector employment 1999–2009
SUMMARYThis article presents an analysis of public sector employment (PSE) and makes comparisons with the private sector, using data from the Labour Force Survey and Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings. It looks at the nature of employment in the public sector before discussing the characteristics that differentiate people employed in both the public and private sector, comparing proportions of public and private sector workers in different groups: by sex, age, ethnicity, disability, working pattern, education, occupation and earnings. This article serves as an update to the 2007 Economic and Labour Market Review (ELMR) article ‘Characteristics of public sector workers’ (Machin and Millard 2007).
Characteristics of public sector workers
Presents analysis of public sector employment and makes comparisons with the private sector, using LFS data.This article presents analysis of public sector employment, and makes comparisons with the private sector, using data from the Labour Force Survey. It looks at characteristics which differentiate people employed in these sectors, comparing proportions of public and private sector workers in different groups: by sex, age, ethnicity, disability, full and part-time working, usual hours worked, job tenure, union membership, occupation and level of qualifications. The article also explains some of the limitations of the data used and the methodology used to derive the estimates.
How important is pro-social behaviour in the delivery of public services?
A number of papers have posited that there is a relationship between institutional structure and pro-social behaviour, in particular donated labour, in the delivery of public services, such as health, social care and education. However, there has been very little empirical research that attempts to measure whether such a relationship exists in practice. This is the aim of this paper. Including a robust set of individual and job-specific controls, we find that individuals in the non-profit sector are significantly more likely to donate their labour, measured by unpaid overtime, than those in the for-profit sector. We can reject that this difference is simply due to implicit contracts or social norms. We find some evidence that individuals differentially select into the non-profit and for-profit sectors according to whether they donate their labour.