86% of Resident Luxembourg Workers Report Job Satisfaction

Ahead of Labour Day, 1 May 2024, Luxembourg's national statistics portal, STATEC, published a report on a variety of figures concerning workers in Luxembourg.

Of the 485,000 employees in Luxembourg, 47% are cross-border workers (123,000 of them from France, 53,000 from Germany and 52,000 from Belgium). 58% of Luxembourg employees are men, 42% are women.

Only one employee in four has the Luxembourgish nationality. Among residents, 257,000 in total, 31% of women work part-time, compared with just 7% of men. The most common reason named for working part-time was family: the assistance of children and adults incapable of work, other family-related responsibilities represented 59% of Luxembourg residents’ choice of working part-time.

Fifteen-to-24-year-olds, women and poorly educated workers are more likely to be employed under part-time contracts. Young people are mainly employed under fixed-term contracts, which account for 8% of the contracts of resident employees. Temporary work is mainly involuntary and is also prevalent among young people. Only a minority of 4% of temporary workers noted they did not want permanent employment.

 Although the majority of resident employees were found to be satisfied at work, a quarter of workers (three in ten workers) said that their pay did not match the work they do.

Over the past decade, the level of well-being at work remained consistently high, STATEC noted, with only one employee in seven not satisfied with their job in Luxembourg in 2022. 86% of resident employees were satisfied with their position and 70% felt sufficiently remunerated for their work in 2022.

However, while 65% of employees felt satisfied with their work and their salary, 21% of workers were satisfied with their work but felt that their salary did not correspond to the position they occupied. In other words, among all the people satisfied with their work, there was always one in four who believed that their salary did not correspond to the tasks they performed.

Conversely, almost all people who declared that their salary was adequate were also satisfied with their work. It seems that an appropriate salary is almost a “guarantee” of job satisfaction. On the other hand, not having an appropriate salary was not always synonymous with dissatisfaction at work: 70% of people whose salary was subjectively insufficient nevertheless reported being satisfied with their work. This suggests that the perception of salary adequacy constitutes an important dimension of well-being in the labour market. Furthermore, an employee out of ten (9%) were not satisfied with their job and found their salary insufficient.

Furthermore, in Luxembourg, 60% of people reported using digital skills more than half the time in their professional environment. In this regard, the Grand Duchy is the leader in Europe, STATEC emphasised. 22% of people reported reading technical documents and 13% said they make complex calculations during the majority of their working time. Less than one person in seven in employment carries out manual tasks during the majority of their working time, and the same goes for heavy physical labour or work involving finger dexterity.

Source: IGSS