Higher education as a moderator of the relationship between the employment instability and the employees’ subjective well-being

Abstract

The article compares employees with higher education and those without, firstly, by the prevalence of attributes of instable, precarious employment, accompanied by low social and legal security, vulnerability; secondly, by the nature of the relationship between the employment instability and subjective well-being, interpreted in a broad sense as a set of diverse assessments of life in general, the situation in the field of work.

Based on the analysis of the data from the All-Russian survey of the working population, it was found that employees with higher education are less involved in precarious forms of labor relations, they are less likely to encounter such attributes of the employment instability as the absence of a termless employment contract, paid sick leave and vacation, unofficial salaries, frequent job changes.

With an increase in the employment instability, life satisfaction decreases equally for workers with and without higher education, whereas job satisfaction is more significant for the latter. The relationship between precarization and job satisfaction is mediated by the presence of higher education, which slightly compensates and smoothes out the negative effects of the employment instability, but at the same time does not help to completely avoid the attributions of precarization and their consequences for subjective well-being.