The happiest workers in the United States live out west.
That’s the finding of a new report by social media intelligence company Brandwatch and jobs site Monster.com that analyzed more than 1.1 million tweets about how Americans feel about their jobs.
The study found the happiest employees are concentrated in the western half of the country, with the exception of Arkansas and Maine.
Hawaii had the happiest bunch, followed by Utah, Oregon, California and Washington. Rounding out the top 10 were Minnesota, Nevada, Maine, Arkansas and Idaho.
While the survey showed that workers on the East Coast are well paid, a good salary doesn’t translate to job satisfaction. Workers in the eastern half of the country expressed the highest dislike for their jobs, with Florida being the most miserable.
Other states with unhappy workers were West Virginia, Delaware, Virginia, Ohio, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Louisiana and Maryland.
Customer service reps, software engineers, baristas and graphic designers were some of the careers that generated the most positive posts. The Twitter hashtag #ilovemyjob was mentioned in 185,378 tweets and 252 retweets over the course of the study, which ran from March 2014 to March 2015.
Government and retail workers, truck drivers and paralegals were among those most likely to gripe about work, with the hashtag #ihatemyjob mentioned 8,051 times and retweeted 16 times during the year.
Overall, the study found more than 942,000 mentions of the phrase “love my job,’’ compared with 201,000 mentions of ”hate my job.’’ Most vocal about disliking their jobs were workers in retail and food/dining, generally low-paying industries with high turnover.
Workers in the technology industry were the least likely to tweet criticisms about their jobs, which the study attributed to the fact that tech workers are more in tune with the potential consequences of publicly trashing their job or employer.
Workers showed the least love for their jobs in July, halfway through the calendar year when most people would rather be on summer vacation than at their desks. The most love came in November but slid off as companies ramped up for holiday sales or end-of-year deadlines.
Not surprisingly, the survey also found that workers love their jobs on Fridays and hate them on Sundays. More than three-quarters of respondents said they experience “Sunday night blues’’ when thinking about starting a new work week.
Some have it bad enough that they want a new job. Nearly 20% of all job searches on Monster begin on a Monday.
