Job security is the possession of a niche in work, allowing some control over the content of a job, what the worker actually does and the opportunity he or she has of building a career. Another way of presenting job security is to refer to property rights in a persons work. In other words, whereas employment security refers to the sense of attachment to a current enterprise or establishment, job security refers to the sense of attachment to a particular job or range of tasks

A national Job Security Index must be calculated on the basis of more indirect proxy measures than the others, and focuses on access to relatively skilled jobs and measures to combat discrimination in job opportunities.

• At the international level, ILO Convention No.100 establishes the principle of equal remuneration between men and women for work of equal value.
• It is complemented by Convention No. 111 which encourages governments to promote policies and instruments guaranteeing the equality of opportunity and treatment in employment and occupation, including access to training, advancement, tenure of job and conditions of work.
• Convention No. 159 extends this principle to discrimination against workers with disabilities.
• Convention No. 156 aims at creating effective equality of opportunity and treatment between men and women with family responsibilities.
• Existence of a Law on paid maternity leave as a guarrantee for women to keep their job in case of pregnancy
• Existence of a Law on paid parental leave for a equal opportunities for men and women regarding their job and career.

• The first is the literacy rate, a proxy measure for basic education. It is mainly intended to discriminate among less developed countries and among the latter and the industrialized world on the minimal conditions for securing a job.
• The second focuses on high-level skills. The indicator is the proportion of adults who have completed post-secondary education. Ideally indicators of vocational training should also have been included but data are not available for industrializing countries. This is meant to estimate the probability of workers being able to develop a career under the premise that the higher their educational level the greater are their chances of succeeding and taking advantage of occupational opportunities.
• Finally, assuming that it is the employees who have the most secure status in employment and therefore potentially more job security, the variable defined as the share of wage employment in total employment has been introduced.

• Direct measures of how effective are the rules and mechanisms designed to ensure job security are not available, not even in developed countries. Proxies are also difficult to identify and options debatable. One single variable has been retained which is the proportion of workers in "professional" occupations in total employment, overall and by sex. It is also supposed here that it is the worker in such high skilled occupations who is most likely to possess a "niche" where he or she can realize his or her personal professional potentials and derive a sense of security.
• Finally, a corrective variable is included to take account of the fact that mainly in countries from the former soviet block large numbers of employees have been put on unpaid administrative leave, whatever their skill level. In countries where such procedures have been extensively used and careers interrupted, in the absence of effective protective mechanisms, insecurity even among the more educated must have grown relatively to countries where such procedures were not pursued.

Second, most of Latin America provides satisfactory job security, fitting in the Pragmatists cluster, which is somewhat surprising. A deeper examination at the components of the index shows that these countries do not only not resort to massive administrative leave - which has a negative effect on the job security scores - but do also perform relatively well in terms of the participation of women in high skilled professions, which has a positive effect on scores.

Western and Northern European countries are mostly Pacesetters, with Finland leading the group. It is surprising to find Panama and Lithuania in this cluster. This can partly be explained by their formal commitments to job security and high educational level combined with favourable ratios for female workers in professional occupations.

However, some European countries, such as Switzerland, Ireland, UK and Greece, also provide satisfactory levels of job security but are in the Pragmatists, reflecting the fact that they give relatively little attention to the formal or instrumental aspects of the provision of security. The worst exception is Italy, which is in the cluster of Conventionals, failing to provide satisfactory job security in spite of having the necessary formal instruments.

Also as in other forms of security, African and Asian countries have the lowest scores and are concentrated in the Much-to-be-Done cluster, the exceptions being South Africa and the Asian OECD countries. As shown in Table 9.4, the latter classify as Pragmatists.