Comparison between by European EseC – full and European EseC - simple

The difference is higher in following ESeC classes:

• 
  Lower supervisors and technicians
  
• 
  Small employers and self-employed (non-agriculture)
  
• 
  Lower sales and service
  

Small employers and self-employed (non-agriculture). The number of employed according to ESeC full is quite higher than ESeC – simple.

The testing of ESeC already carried out covers only employed person. The other categories – unemployed and inactive persons (according to their last job) will be also included in the testing on the next step. The expected problems and constrains are the following:

• 
  In the LFS the characteristics of last employment are available only for not-employed person who worked at last within 8 year prior to the reference year;.
  
• 
  In the LFS variables ‘supervisory responsibilities’ and ‘number of persons working at the local unit’ are not available for the previous job.
  

6.2. Structure of Earnings Survey

The Structure of Earnings Survey (SES) a four-yearly earnings survey conducted under the Council Regulation 530/1999 and the Commission Regulation 1916/2000 as amended by Commission regulation 1738/2005.

Goal of the survey: The Structure of Earnings Survey is aimed to give detailed and comparable at European Union level information on distribution and relationships between the level of remuneration, individual characteristics of employees and these of their employer.

Objects of the survey are: characteristics of employer (enterprise, local unit) - number of employees in the local unit, type of ownership, existence and type of collective pay agreement, size of the enterprise; individual characteristics of employees - age, sex, educational level, occupation, length of service, mode of employment (full-time/part-time), working hours per day, working days per week, type of employment contract, annual gross earnings, annual bonuses, annual payments in kind, annual days of paid holiday leave, monthly gross earnings, earnings related to overtime, earnings related to shift work, employee’s compulsory social security contributions and income tax, number of paid monthly hours, number of paid overtime hours.

Statistical units of the survey are local units and employees:

1. 
   Local units
   

SES 2002: Local units with 1 or more employees belonging to enterprises with 10 or more employees. 

2) Employees with earnings during October, having at least 1 working day paid by the employer at a full rate.

Economic activities covered: Mining and quarrying (C), Manufacturing (D), Electricity, gas and water supply (E), Construction (F), Wholesale and retail trade, repair of motor vehicles, motorcycles and personal and household goods (G), Hotels and restaurants (H), Transport, storage and communications (I), Financial intermediation (J), Real estate, renting and business activities (K), Public administration; compulsory social security (L), Education (M), Health and social work (N) and Other community, social and personal service activities (O).

Reference periods: The reference year is the calendar year (2002, 2006). For representative month is approved October as being the month that is least affected by absences owing to annual leave or public holidays.

Periodicity: The survey is to be carried out once per four years. The first round was launched for the reference year 2002 and the second one for 2006.

Sampling design and sampling size: The sampling procedure used for the SES contains two stages. In the first stage, a stratified random sample of local units without replacement is drawn. Stratification criteria used include:

- economic activity (at the 2-digit level of NACE Rev.1.1);

- the number of employees in the local unit :

1 to 9 employees

10 to 49 employees

50 to 249 employees

250 to 499 employees

500 to 999 employees

1000 and more employees;

- regional breakdown - level 1 of NUTS;

At the second stage, a systematic sample of employees is taken within each of the selected local units.

Sampling rates and number of records finally used

Occupation in the reference month is collected for each employee in the sample. Data are coded by enterprises according to National Classification of Occupations.

SES micro-data are transmitted to Eurostat coded at 3-digit level of ISCO-88 COM.

SES 2002

In the 2002 SES data were required at the 4-digit level of acting National Classification of Occupations (NCO1996), but 3-digit codes were also accepted.

Basic problem was the fact that by the time of reference year 2002 the occupational classification largely had no popularity amongst enterprises as there was no specific legal requirement (e.g. social security, tax authorities, etc.) for its application. For that reason an Annex with the National Classification of Occupations at 4-digit level was attached to the Explanatory notes for completion of the SES questionnaire. In addition, for these enterprises that had difficulty to code the occupations of their employees a possibility for word description was given in the questionnaire and coding was completed later by regional offices of NSI.

Coding to ISCO-88 (COM): a conversion table from the NCO-1996 to ISCO-88 (COM) was used. Generally, there were no serious problems in recoding of data as both classifications are consistent at 3 digit level.

SES 2006

In 2006 a new version of national occupational classification came into force. The 2006 was given as a transition period for the enterprises to move to the revised classification. Therefore in the SES questionnaire was given possibility to be used either 4-digit codes of NCO-1996 (for all employees’ records provided by a local unit) or 8-digit codes of the new NCOD–2005 (for all employees’ records provided by a local unit). The mixed use of both classifications by one local unit was not accepted. Similarly to the SES 2002, for these enterprises that had difficulty to code the occupations of their employees a possibility for word description was given in the questionnaire and coding was completed later by regional offices of NSI.

The national minor groups 112 ‘Senior Government Officials’ and 113 ‘Mayors and local government senior officials’ were recoded to ISCO-88 (COM) minor group 111 ‘Legislators and senior government officials’ after reference to the definitional notes in the ISCO-88 (COM) Guide for Users (p.14): http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/ier/research/isco88/ .

The SES represents a case in which information on occupation at minor group level of ISCO is available, it is not known that all individuals are employees but there is no information on supervisory status. As a result only one column of the ESeC table could be completed. ESeC classes applied are those assigned to the category “Other employees”. In fact ESeC classes in category ‘Other employees “ are almost identical with the codes from the simplified class column ‘ess sc’ with only few exceptions:

The derived ESeC matrix could be seen in Annex 2 to this report. The table contains figures on absolute and relative frequency of each occupational group, for the 2002 and 2006 SES datasets.

As it was already mentioned above, we could not find correspondence only to one minor group from the NCOD-2005: 745 “Other craft and related trades workers, not classified elsewhere”. These records were coded with ‘740’ and are classified under sub major group ISCO-88 (COM) 74 “Other craft and related trades workers”. The number of employees classified under this group is 6 940 and represents relatively small share (0.3%) in the total number of employees.

In the table below is presented the distribution of employees by ESeC classes in the 2002 and 2006 SES datasets. The highest share has class 9 ‘Routine occupations’ and class 6 ‘Lower supervisory and lower technician occupations’ is least represented. The structure of the EseC classes remain relatively stable between the two rounds of the survey. More significant changes are observed in class 2 – its share decreases from 19.39% in 2002 to 14.85% in 2006. Reversely, the share class 7 increases from 11.86% in 2002 to 17.03% in 2006. It is mainly due to extension of the coverage to the enterprises with 1 and more employees. Inclusion of the small units has its influence on the occupational structure as a whole.

The possibility to control the quality of the collected information on occupational codes of employees in SES is limited as in the common situation the process of coding is done by enterprises. Exceptions occur when respondents provided written description of the occupation which enables later the coding to be done by regional offices of NSI. Therefore misclassification of occupations might be either respondents’ error or error of NSI’s staff.

Two basic checks of quality of occupational codes are performed:

Global checks: the data entry program checks for non-existing occupational codes that do not belong to the acting National Classification of Occupations.

Plausibility checks are applied at micro and macro level to ensure the consistency of the information on occupations with the other SES variables: economic activity and sector (public/private) of the organization; level of employee’s monthly and annual earnings, educational level of the employee, etc.
6.3. Comparison between data from the Labour Force Survey and Structure of Earning Survey

For the purpose of comparison only data of employees with labour contract are used from the Labour force survey.

The differences are acceptable, taking in mind some differences in the methodology and coverage of the two surveys.