What Does underemployment Mean
Underemployment is the action and effect of underemployment . This verb refers, according to the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) , to employing someone in a lower position than that which would correspond to them according to their capacity .
Underemployment can arise from various factors, although it is usually considered as a phenomenon installed in society when the labor market presents distortions and employment conditions are precarious. As a result, the affected workers are unable to access the positions they should occupy based on their training and experience and end up accepting to work in other positions that imply lower pay and prestige.
For example: an engineer cannot find a company that allows him to practice his profession and ends up accepting a sales position that only requires a high school diploma as a requirement. It 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 position of salesperson but who cannot compete against someone with an engineering degree.
Analyzed from a strict point of view, underemployment is a worrying and involuntary situation, which reveals the fragile organization of the labor system and the lack of foresight and planning in a country. If there are 400 positions available for a certain profession, one that depends almost exclusively on one entity to be exercised, then the number of graduates should not exceed the vacancies excessively.
How to forbid a person to study what he wants, to pursue his vocation ? Surely it would not be a very democratic measure, but there are fair ways to limit the number of professionals in each field. There are countries in which the grade point average of secondary studies is taken into account to determine whether an individual is suitable or not to pursue the career he has chosen. As cold but as organized as it seems, a table lists, 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 shone in their passage through 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 parties, 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 undoubtedly an unfortunate phenomenon for many professionals who gave years of their lives to studying a career and personal development. In an overcrowded world with a glut of college students serving coffee , the biggest companies have at their disposal a ruthless arsenal of requirements for their staffing campaigns: They can demand the wildest combinations of experience and training, confident that they will find the right thing to do. the perfect employee; the reality, however, is often very different.
Among the people who fail a job interview for not meeting an impossible set of requirements, there are those who have enough intuition and experience to compensate for their weaknesses. Likewise, many of the lucky ones have nothing but degrees to their credit, and they have never put their knowledge to use.
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 dedicates only two hours a day to his job is considered underemployed.
In summary, underemployment appears when an employed individual does not reach a level of full employment . This last concept, for its part, is given by the existence of work for all the people who seek it and by the productivity of said work.