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"Underemployment."
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Not working : where have all the good jobs gone?
Don't trust low unemployment numbers as proof that the labor market is doing fine - it isn't. Not Working is about those who can't find full-time work at a decent wage - the underemployed - and how their plight is contributing to widespread despair, a worsening drug epidemic, and the unchecked rise of right-wing populism. In this revelatory and outspoken book, David Blanchflower draws on his acclaimed work in the economics of labor and well-being to explain why today's postrecession economy is vastly different from what came before. He calls out our leaders and policymakers for failing to see the Great Recession coming, and for their continued failure to address one of the most unacknowledged social catastrophes of our time. Blanchflower shows how many workers are underemployed or have simply given up trying to find a well-paying job, how wage growth has not returned to prerecession levels despite rosy employment indicators, and how general prosperity has not returned since the crash of 2008. Standard economic measures are often blind to these forgotten workers, which is why Blanchflower practices the \"economics of walking about \" -seeing for himself how ordinary people are faring under the recovery, and taking seriously what they say and do. Not Working is his candid report on how the young and the less skilled are among the worst casualties of underemployment, how immigrants are taking the blame, and how the epidemic of unhappiness and self-destruction will continue to spread unless we deal with it.
Book
The Social Cost of Underemployment
Going beyond the usual focus on unemployment, this 2004 book explores the health effects of other kinds of underemployment including forms of inadequate employment as involuntary part-time and poverty wage work. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, this compares falling into unemployment versus inadequate employment relative to remaining adequately employed. Outcomes include self-esteem, alcohol abuse, depression, and low birth weight. The panel data permit study of the plausible reverse causation hypothesis of selection. Because the sample is national and followed over two decades, the study explores cross-level effects (individual change and community economic climate) and developmental transitions. Special attention is given to school leavers and welfare mothers, and, in cross-generational analysis, the effect of mothers' employment on babies' birth weights. There emerges a way of conceptualizing employment status as a continuum ranging from good jobs to bad jobs to employment with implications for policy on work and health.
eBook
The labor of hope : meritocracy and precarity in Egypt
Technological advancements, expanding education, and unfettered capitalism have encouraged many around the world to aspire to better lives, even as declines in employment and widening inequality are pushing more and more people into insecurity and hardship. In Egypt, a generation of young men desire fulfilling employment, meaningful relationships, and secure family life, yet find few paths to achieve this. The Labor of Hope follows these educated but underemployed men as they struggle to establish careers and build satisfying lives. In so doing, this book reveals the lived contradiction at the heart of capitalist systems—the expansive dreams they encourage and the precarious lives they produce. Harry Pettit follows young men as they engage a booming training, recruitment, and entrepreneurship industry that sells the cruel meritocratic promise that a good life is realizable for all. He considers the various ways individuals cultivate distraction and hope for future mobility: education, migration, consumption, and prayer. These hope-filled practices are a form of emotional labor for young men, placing responsibility on the individual rather than structural issues in Egypt's economy. Illuminating this emotional labor, Pettit shows how the capitalist economy continues to capture the attention of the very people harmed by it.
eBook
Penalized or protected? Gender and the consequences of nonstandard and mismatched employment histories
Millions of workers are employed in positions that deviate from the full-time, standard employment relationship or work in jobs that are mismatched with their skills, education, or experience. Yet, little is known about how employers evaluate workers who have experienced these employment arrangements, limiting our knowledge about how part-time work, temporary agency employment, and skills underutilization affect workers' labor market opportunities. Drawing on original field and survey experiment data, I examine three questions: (1) What are the consequences of having a nonstandard or mismatched employment history for workers' labor market opportunities? (2) Are the effects of nonstandard or mismatched employment histories different for men and women? and (3) What are the mechanisms linking nonstandard or mismatched employment histories to labor market outcomes? The field experiment shows that skills underutilization is as scarring for workers as a year of unemployment, but that there are limited penalties for workers with histories of temporary agency employment. Additionally, although men are penalized for part-time employment histories, women face no penalty for part-time work. The survey experiment reveals that employers' perceptions of workers' competence and commitment mediate these effects. These findings shed light on the consequences of changing employment relations for the distribution of labor market opportunities in the \"new economy.\"
Journal Article
Evaluating the determinants of the perceptions of underemployment among young university graduates: A South African University case
There has been a wave of significant changes in labour markets worldwide, which has seen the pace of secure and stable employment decline significantly. South Africa has not been saved from this wave of change. Besides the country's high unemployment rate, both at the national level and among the youth by global standards, non-standard employment such as casual and part-time work has been rising. Simultaneously, advanced education has additionally demonstrated no guarantee of employment. Rising labour market instability has therefore necessitated exploring alternative measures of labour underutilisation over and above the typical measures of unemployment. This is a critical study, particularly in South Africa, where youth's extreme lack of employment opportunities is likely to push them towards non-standard forms of employment. Hence the primary objective of the study was to analyse underemployment among young university graduates in South Africa. The study followed a quantitative research approach that entailed primary data collection through a survey. Firstly, descriptive statistics of the frequency distribution for discrete data. Secondly, an ordinary least squares regression model was employed where three different types of regressions were used to analyse the determinants of the three types of underemployment. The main findings show race and marital status as significant factors determining underemployment status. The rest of the results are discussed, and conclusions and recommendations are drawn to show how dynamic youth labour markets are in developing countries. The paper looks at associations and makes no causality claims.
Journal Article
Relative Education and the Advantage of a College Degree
What is the worth of a college degree when higher education expands? The relative education hypothesis posits that when college degrees are rare, individuals with more education have less competition to enter highly-skilled occupations. When college degrees are more common, there may not be enough highly-skilled jobs to go around; some college-educated workers lose out to others and are pushed into less-skilled jobs. Using new measurements of occupation-level verbal, quantitative, and analytic skills, this study tests the changing effect of education on skill utilization across 70 years of birth cohorts from 1971 to 2010, net of all other age, period, and cohort trends. Higher-education expansion erodes the value of a college degree, and college-educated workers are at greater risk for underemployment in less cognitively demanding occupations. This raises questions about the sources of rising income inequality, skill utilization across the working life course, occupational sex segregation, and how returns to education have changed across different life domains.
Journal Article
REFERENCE-DEPENDENT JOB SEARCH
We propose a model of job search with reference-dependent preferences, with loss aversion relative to recent income (the reference point). In this model, newly unemployed individuals search hard since consumption is below their reference point. Over time, though, they get used to lower income and thus reduce their search effort. In anticipation of a benefit cut, their search effort rises again, then declines once they get accustomed to the lower postcut benefit level. The model fits the typical pattern of exit from unemployment, even with no unobserved heterogeneity. To distinguish between this and other models, we use a unique reform in the unemployment insurance (UI) benefit path. In 2005, Hungary switched from a singlestep UI system to a two-step system, with overall generosity unchanged. The system generated increased hazard rates in anticipation of, and especially following, benefit cuts in ways the standard model has a hard time explaining. We estimate a model with optimal consumption, endogenous search effort, and unobserved heterogeneity. The reference-dependent model fits the hazard rates substantially better than plausible versions of the standard model, including habit formation. Our estimates indicate a slow-adjusting reference point and substantial impatience, likely reflecting present-bias.
Journal Article