A number of years ago, back in California, I found myself on the unemployment roll. At that time the California Employment Development Department required all professionals on the unemployment roll to attend a job searching seminar as a condition of receiving the unemployment check.
So I found myself in a room with some 40 professional unemployed people. The instructor (a former Navy officer) started the seminar by asking the participants about their feelings about their last jobs. Everyone, person after person, was reporting how fine things were and how they liked their jobs. Finally, when an analyst sacked by some Navy department started the same mantra, the instructor interrupted him by saying "I've been in the Navy, so do not tell me that bullshit. I know what you really think about that job, and that is what I want to hear."
That was the proverbial kid saying "the emperor has no clothes" that broke the spell. The unemployed Navy analyst spit it out how much he hated his last job, and when the instructor asked everyone else to tell their real feelings - most of them said pretty much the same thing.
Unlike Europeans, who love to wallow in misery (their own and other people's), the US-ers are programmed to project an upbeat, positive image on the pain of being seen as misfits and failures. So everybody makes a happy face and repeats the "happy, happy" mantra, especially when talking to strangers.
That is why polls asking people what they feel about their jobs are pretty much worthless. All they do is to repeat conventional expectations and small-talk postures.
Moreover, most US-ers have no way to compare their working conditions to those in other countries, because they do not know much about other countries in general, let alone what working conditions there are. For example, how many people know that the US is the ONLY developed country that has no legally protected paid time off. Only in the US the paid time off (vacation and holidays) is totally left to the employer's discretion. As a result, the average paid vacation in the US is 10 days, while in most other developed countries - 4- 6 weeks.
Wojtek