Underemployment
Underemployment is the Bad News Bears of econ. What’s worse is that, in the U.S., it’s becoming more and more of a problem in the long-run for a variety of reasons.
Underemployment refers to the state of affairs where would-be full-time workers are only working part-time, or where workers' skills are being underutilized in the economy.
Why is underemployment becoming more of a problem? Well, the biggie: robots are taking our jobs. The U.S. has been losing manufacturing jobs for a long time now, leaving many people unemployed, dazed, and confused. Professional service jobs are being replaced with A.I., and just good internet user experiences. See LegalZoom.com and Houzz.com for details. Imagine how many basic lawyers and decorators they'll be replacing in the next decade.
With the near-future onset of driverless cars replacing the entire industry of long-distance truck drivers, many blue collar jobs are disappearing. Other white collar jobs at risk: accounting, administrative tasks, writing articles…even writing music (as if that's a legitimate industry for the 347 people who actually make a living doing it).
If you think teaching everyone to code is a solution, well...it’s not a good one for the entire economy. Especially since we’re not far off from A.I. being able to do basic coding on its own. What jobs are the robots not after? The ones hard to automate...like plumbers and freeway overpass builders.
Sure, some of these displaced workers whose jobs are automated get retrained into other types of work, but government retraining programs (at least in the U.S. of A) have embarrassingly low success rates. (Think about the type of people who'd sign up to have the government retrain them. Yeah...they now work at TSA, stealing toenail clippers all day long). Plus, more and more contract and gig jobs are replacing regular full-time jobs with benefits, since it saves employers money. And with an overeducated workforce, we’ve got college grads working as baristas and law school graduates loaded with student debt, unable to find a law-related job.
The mismatch of skills and available jobs, as well as the changing landscape of available jobs due to increased contract work and automation, make underemployment a real threat to the economy.
Remember, underemployment isn’t people who are choosing not to work—it’s people who made bad decisions in their educational paths and would rather have full-time jobs than not, and who would rather use their skills than not. Underemployment is associated with poverty, since people have a hard time finding enough work to support themselves.
Only time will tell what the government decides to do about increasing underemployment as retraining programs continue with their poor success rates.