OECD: Work – People should not have to work if they don’t want to

July 12, 2007 at 8:09 am (Economic, OECD, Social, Statistic)

In the World Values Survey, a series of questions on attitude towards work such below was asked:

Attitude towards Work: People should not have to work if they don’t want to

There are 5 categorical answers: “strongly agree”, “agree”, “neither agree nor disagree”, “disagree” and “disagree strongly”. Selected OECD countries’s result is shown in 3 forms: a) the percentage (%) of people strongly agree with the statement, b) the percentage (%) of people strongly disagree with the statement, and c) mean score of the statement, by assigning value 5 for ”strongly agree”, 4 on “agree”, 3 for “neither agree nor disagree”, 2 for “disagree” and 1 for “strongly disagree”. The graphs depicted the result are shown as below:

a) the percentage (%) of people strongly agree with the statement: “People should not have to work if they don’t want to”

Oh, tell me about it, where would be the place that it is ok for people don’t have to work if they don’t want: only handful of 12.8% French, 12.6% Turkish, 10.7% Luxembourger and 10.1% Belgian. Nice. So how exactly is the people going to survive without working? I guess not by social welfare benefits: only 2.0% Swedish, 2.1% Dutch, 2.3% Danish, 2.6% Canadian strongly agree with the statement.

b) the percentage (%) of people strongly disagree with the statement: “”People should not have to work if they don’t want to”

So 31.1% people in Denmark, 29.4% in Germany (West), 27% in both Luxembourg and Hungary strongly disagree that people should not have to work if they don’t want to. However, only a small percentage of people in places like Iceland, Spain, Ireland and Italy strongly disagree with such statement.

c) Overall mean score of the statement. 5 for “strongly agree” and 1 for “strongly disagree”

All of the participant countries generally disagree that people should not have to work if they don’t want to, except Iceland which has the score pass the middle point 3. The social-welfare based countries like Denmark and Sweden are seeing lower score (towards stronger disagreement) compared to Turkey and Spain.

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