Job satisfaction among British workers has fallen to 74%, the lowest level recorded since the British Social Attitudes survey began asking the question in 1989. A decade ago it was 81%. The Resolution Foundation's analysis of the 2025 data identifies a compound problem: stagnant pay, eroding flexibility, insecure contracts, and shrinking autonomy are converging to produce what the thinktank calls a "dissatisfaction drain" — a slow bleed of worker engagement with direct implications for productivity and labour supply. The withdrawal is measurable. The share of workers willing to go above and beyond for their employer dropped from 69% in 2015 to 55% in 2025. The proportion describing their job as interesting fell from 74% to 63%. These are not marginal shifts in sentiment — they represent a structural downgrade in the psychological contract between employers and employees. Workers still believe in the intrinsic value of work (only 4% say it has little), but they no longer believe their specific jobs deliver on that value. Pay is the sharpest grievance. Economist Hannah Slaughter notes that dissatisfaction with compensation now spans all pay scales, not just the lowest-paid workers. After more than a decade of real-wage compression and a cost-of-living crisis that eroded purchasing power across the income distribution, the complaint has generalized. Workers at every level feel underpaid relative to effort and cost of living, and that perception is not irrational — it tracks ONS data on real wage stagnation since 2008. Flexibility has become the second front. The pandemic demonstrated that remote and hybrid work was viable for millions of roles. Many employers have since attempted to claw back that flexibility through return-to-office mandates and tighter scheduling. The Resolution Foundation data shows this is generating friction: workers increasingly list flexibility and independence as baseline expectations, not perks. When employers treat them as negotiable, disengagement follows. Separate Ipsos polling stretching back to 1976 corroborates the trend on a longer timeline. Satisfaction stood at 83% in 1976, compared with 69% in the latest reading — a decline that predates the pandemic and points to a structural erosion rather than a cyclical dip. The British workplace has been getting worse for workers on their own terms for decades; the post-pandemic period has simply accelerated the reckoning. Pollster John Curtice pushes back on the lazy narrative that younger workers have become work-shy. The data does not support it. What has changed is the threshold: workers of all ages now require more from employers — financial reward and schedule flexibility — before they commit discretionary effort. The old compact where loyalty was exchanged for stability has broken down on both sides, but employers appear to have noticed last. The productivity implications are the political payload. Britain's output-per-hour growth has been anaemic since the financial crisis. If a growing share of the workforce is withholding effort because the deal feels bad, that is not a cultural problem — it is a management and policy problem. The Resolution Foundation is effectively telling employers and government: you cannot extract productivity gains from a workforce that has rationally concluded the returns do not flow back to them.
