The almost-job

      This essays won’t be about ‘unemployment’ as such—due to the entanglement of the phenomenon and its imbalance regarding the economy in which it occurs. It will bring into focus a hypercritical theme known as underemployment, which consequences are relativly and often times disregarded, or obscured as an answer to long-term unemployement. I will attempt to define the true nature of underemployment, its effects and the consideration it has been given both in reasearch and labor policy. One strong point I will strive to make is that unlike ‘unemployment’, underunemployment has an noxious structural mechanism that makes it hard be dealt with, hence the need to take suited measures.

Underemployment is defined somehow as an inferior, lesser, or lower quality type of employment. In addition, underemployment is defined relative to some standard. In some cases, under-employment is defined relative to the employment experiences of others with the same education or work history; in other cases, underemployment is defined relative to the person’s own past education or work history. Feldman, 1996.¹

Since underemployment has been conceptualized in so many ways and from diverse economical perspectives², no detailed material is ready for use. Although 25% of the workforce being underemployed (including part-time jobs and temporary employment) seems lifelike to the growth of college graduates struggling to find a job matching their degree, or post-2008 recession laid-off workers failing to rejoin the workforce.

Not only is underunemployment relative and dependent to the economy but has strong geographical binds. Underemployment is also about skill distribution and ‘human’ resource allocation. A society in which assets are inefficiently assigned, income consequently, for a group drops, raises for another. At the microeconomic scale, low quality of life (QOL)³, as well as life expectancy, health, physical security, hunger, and homelessness are all by-product of low-income. Career history plays a strong card in someone’s proneness to face underemployment. For instance, a recently laid-off person is more likely to undertake any given job⁴. But it doesn’t end here, being pushed away the formal education area causes a person to lose current industry standards, thus being slurred over and ignored by potential recruiters. Unemployment is also a matter of fear that has deep consequences on what career path students chose for their future⁵. In an ‘artificially’ non-disparate labor market where people opt for a profession somehow matching the need of the economy, we might expect the phenomenon to replicate due a surplus switch. Consequently, lower income has significant repercussions on family behavior: spouse likely to take a second job, resulting in lower quality of life, including the kids who might feel to be put at a disadvantage.

To be a child in a family with inadequate income often means to be a child deprived of the kinds of food he needs to grow to healthy adult- hood. It often means living in overcrowded quarters, with no decent place to play; going without preventive health care; and having little chance for more than a high school education. For about 1 in 4 it means that there is no father in the home; the mother is likely to work while the child is still very young.⁶

It is an obligation for public policy to tackle this issue and address such plaguing situations. The sequels of underemployment are to have peerless outcomes on the current middle class, transforming economically healthy and educated groups into impoverished/benighted ones. Policy makers as well as organisation and companies need to campaign against institutionalized underemployment. To fight unemployment back, first and foremost, we need to puzzle out its facets and carry out adequate measures, with regard to the severity of its out-turns.