(Page 9 of 18) - Happiness and Employment: A Rawlsian Justification for the Right to Work authored by Gorton, Bill.

explains the connection between employment and happiness. But overall the correlation
between pay and work satisfaction is quite weak, about .15 to .17 (Ibid.). As we just saw,
after poverty is exited, absolute increases in pay offer little hedonic payoff. Nonetheless,
employed people tend to be happier than the unemployed even after the effects of income
are controlled. What explains this? A number of factors appear to be at work here. Work
provides an arena for a person to develop and use his or her skills, it can provide an
enriching social milieu, and it is a source of status and self-esteem (Haring et al. 1984,
Hackman and Oldham 1976, Warr 1999, Argyle 1989, Argyle and Henderson 1985).
Even work that is mostly drudgery can be a source of self-esteem, probably because a
person can take pride in the fact that their employment indicates that he or she is
producing a service or product that society values. In addition, hedonic psychologists
have found that workers are more likely to enjoy their jobs if they permit a degree of
autonomy, if they believe their work to be meaningful, and if work is engaging because it
requires sufficiently challenging use and development of skills. People tend to like work
that requires skill and concentration. If the work is too simple or repetitive it becomes
boring. (However, if it is too difficult the dominant effect is frustration, rather than
pleasure or satisfaction.) Also, employees tend to enjoy working in small cooperative
teams.

Leisure

Though work is an important source of happiness for most people, time off from

work is, too. Overall, satisfaction with leisure has a correlation with happiness of .20 after
controls for employment, social class and other factors are applied (Veenhoven et al.,
1994). Of course, the concept of leisure canvasses wide terrain. Leisure might include
watching television, working on one's car, volunteering at a soup kitchen, playing tennis,
going dancing, drinking with friends at a pub, practicing the guitar, reading a book,
watching a play, listening to music, relaxing on the beach, and countless other activities
that people do for enjoyment or fulfillment without remuneration. However, different
types of leisure can be categorized usefully and examined for their hedonic benefits. A
three-part typology captures important features of leisure: consumption pleasures, goal-
oriented leisure (sometime referred to as “telic” leisure in the literature), and
interpersonal relations. Naturally, many types of leisure are a combination of more than
one of these kinds, and often leisure contains elements of all three. Still, it is instructive
to tease out the different kinds of leisure because the hedonic value of each kind is quite
different.

Consumption leisure may be defined as any activity in which the direct goal is to

derive pleasure or satisfaction. Consumption so defined includes most “consumer
pleasures,” such as buying a new car or new clothes. But it also includes such activities as
eating a meal, riding a roller coaster, listening to music, watching a movie, or taking a hot
bath. Pleasure is derived from such activities directly, in contrast to goal-oriented
activities, where the pleasure is a by-product. For example, taking guitar lessons, fixing
one's car, solving a crossword puzzle, learning a foreign language, running a marathon
and gardening bring satisfaction through mastering skills and achieving goals. But in
order to do so, the goals must be seen as desirable in themselves and not merely as
vehicles to pleasure. Consumption can be an important source of happiness, and, of