Table 1.

Summary of concepts used in the allegory of employment quality (EQ).

Concept	Definition
Sociopolitical factors	Labor laws and enforcement, workers’ rights and social protections, prevailing business practices, science and technology, and political rhetoric/public discourse [39,40,41,52]. They exist everywhere but their forms and functions are specific to place and time. Together with labor market contexts, they set the grade of the tilted playing field on which the arrangements and conditions of employment exist.
Labor market context	The particulars of time and place-specific unemployment rates, informal employment rates, and demands for goods and services that are interrelated to sociopolitical factors and form the worker–employer reality where arrangements and conditions of employment exist.
Political power	Power used to influence society through the political process, such as employers’ lobbying and political contributions, and workers’ voting and community activism [40]. Political power influences the grade of the slope of the employment playing field.
Power resources [20]	Tools, or sources of power, that the employer and workers each can use to try to achieve their respective wants. Workers can use their human capital (i.e., education, skills) and collective organization. Employers can use hiring and firing authority, job simplification, flexible staffing practices, non-union positions, relocation, and outsourcing. These are sources of potential power and may not be actually exercised (see “power resources model”).
Employment quality	The result of the power dynamics that shapes arrangements and conditions of employment; a package consisting of employment stability, rights for workers and their ability to exercise them, and the terms of employment [4,5,10]. The package exists on a conceptual spectrum of better and poorer configurations of these characteristics. From the employer’s perspective, the package represents labor cost and worker productivity [50].
Power resources model [20]	Describes the calculations and processes parties use in attempting to achieve their respective wants; results in exchange or conflict if power resources are relatively balanced, and exploitation if one party’s power resources outweigh the other’s. Power may not have to be actively used in a given circumstance if all parties understand the imbalance [20,38].