How Covid-19 has Affected Job Satisfaction Over Different time Horizons: a Multidimensional Analysis for Italy

The coronavirus pandemic drastically disrupted societies, altering daily routines and affecting economies' and labor markets' functioning. In the short-term, the labor market experienced diverse impacts: many workers lost jobs or faced temporary suspensions, while others transitioned to remote work or faced increased workloads in pandemic-critical roles. Despite these deep and heterogeneous impacts, and negative outlooks and expectations regarding the labor market in the initial stages of Covid-19, in the longer-term a “new normality” seems to have taken place; nonetheless, “a new normality” highly differentiated among occupational sectors and jobs. Such scenario may have altered the individual work-related well-being in different ways, affecting in turn quality of life and individual health. This paper sets two analytical goals. First, to examine to what extent the pandemic experience has affected job satisfaction, focusing on the short- (the apex of Covid-19), mid- (one year later) and long- (two and three years later) term. Second, we analyze whether this association has been moderated by some key job characteristics, inspecting heterogeneities both in different dimensions of job satisfaction and across occupations. Using data from the European Labour Force Survey, the study adopts a multi-dimensional approach to job satisfaction, recognizing its complexity as a composite concept. The Italian case is of particular interest, given the country's early and severe exposure to the pandemic, becoming Europe’s first viral epicentre, but also considering that Italy entered the pandemic characterized by a labor market displaying several weaknesses. In the short run, we detect a sharp decrease of job satisfaction which is more severe for the extrinsic dimension than for the intrinsic one. But considering the mid- and long-term perspective, it emerges the temporariness of this pattern, and job satisfaction resumed its pre-pandemic increasing trend. We find also that two key job characteristics moderate the association between Covid-19 and job satisfaction: indeed, in the short-term, some heterogeneous outcomes come out based on the precariousness and the essentiality of an occupation. Implications for the analyses of the elation between occupational conditions and job satisfaction are discussed.