ILPC 2027

 A boosted sense of job satisfaction over time, especially while working for the same employer is considered by the social democratic and, to a lesser extent liberal pundits to be one of the fundamental rights of employees as well as one of the basic responsibilities of company managers and policy makers to ensure.

Conventional human capital theories also assume a direct association between job satisfaction, employment periods and managerial status (‘seniority’) as a reflection of increasing rewards for the accumulated work experiences, skills and promotions.

However, this paper will challenge human capital theories arguing that potentially benign implications of ‘seniority’ for job satisfaction are undermined and even reversed by the range of meddling influences. To support our claim, we will use both quantitative and ethnographic fieldwork data from the shipyards in one of the largest emerging market economies in the World, Turkey.

We will, first of all, show that the relationship between job satisfaction and ‘seniority’ is rather complicated. One reason for this is because the notion of a linear correlation between ‘seniority’ and actual rewards with regard to, for example, promotion or pay rise hardly survives an empirical scrutiny. Nor is there an intrinsic connection between job satisfaction and the rewards linked to ‘seniority’.

The role of ‘seniority’ in job satisfaction is further complicated by the variations across different components of job satisfaction when it is decomposed into, for instance, satisfaction with pay, participation, sense of achievement and training.

In particular, ‘seniority’ appears to be a trade off with satisfaction about the sense of success, participation and job itself: Securing a higher managerial status or longer employment durations occasionally comes up with a cost of compromised job satisfaction. Critically, such a trade off with ‘seniority’ can also be said of aggregate job satisfaction.