Underemployment occurs when an individual is employed in a position lower than that which would correspond to him or her based on his or her training.
Underemployment is the action and effect of underemploying . According to the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) , this verb refers to employing someone in a position lower than that which would correspond to their capacity .
Underemployment can arise from various factors, although it is usually considered a phenomenon that occurs in society when the labour market is distorted and employment conditions are precarious. As a result, affected workers are unable to access the positions they should occupy based on their training and experience and end up accepting other jobs that imply lower pay and prestige.
For example, an engineer cannot find a company that will allow him to practice his profession and ends up accepting a sales position that only requires a high school diploma. This is a clear case of underemployment, since the individual is qualified to perform a more complex job function. Underemployment has consequences not only for the engineer, but also for people without a university education who could fill the sales position but who cannot compete against someone with an engineering degree.
Underemployment and the labor system
Analysed from a strict point of view, underemployment is a worrying and involuntary situation, which reveals the fragile organisation of the labour system and the lack of foresight and planning in a country. If there are 400 positions available for a given profession, one that depends almost exclusively on one entity to be performed, then the number of graduates should not exceed the vacancies excessively.
How can you prohibit a person from studying what he wants, from pursuing his vocation ? It would certainly not be a very democratic measure, but there are fair ways of limiting the number of professionals in each field. There are countries in which the average grades of secondary school are taken into account to determine whether or not an individual is suitable for the career he has chosen. As cold but as organized as it seems, a table details, for example, the minimum score to aspire to be a doctor.
Then there can be debates about the right to a second chance that a person who has not excelled in high school deserves; on the other hand, there are many people who are happy to know that their doctors are academically brilliant people. In favor of both sides, many brilliant minds have not obtained good grades in their studies and many geniuses have been feared despots and abusers (see Adolf Hitler ).
Underemployment is a consequence of a distorted or fragile labour market.
A recurring phenomenon
Underemployment is undoubtedly a sad phenomenon for many professionals who have devoted years of their lives to studying for a career and to personal development. In an overpopulated world with too many college students serving coffee , the largest companies have at their disposal a ruthless arsenal of requirements for their staffing campaigns: they can demand the most outrageous combinations of experience and training, confident that they will find the perfect employee ; the reality, however, is often very different.
Among those who fail a job interview because they do not meet an “impossible” set of requirements, there are those who have enough intuition and experience to compensate for their weaknesses. Similarly, many of the lucky ones have nothing more than degrees to their name, and have never put their knowledge into practice.
Another meaning of the term underemployment
Another use of the notion of underemployment is linked to people who work irregularly or who only work a small number of hours a week. A street vendor who spends only two hours a day on his job is considered underemployed.
In short, underemployment occurs when an employed individual does not reach a level of full employment . This last concept, in turn, is given by the existence of work for all the people who seek it and by the productivity of said work.