Underemployment is seldom defined

Underemployment is seldom defined

http://www.nevadaappeal.com/article/20110320/BUSINESS/110319506/1005&parentprofile=1058

Need2Bworking wrote:Underemployment is seldom defined

http://www.nevadaappeal.com/article/20110320/BUSINESS/110319506/1005&parentprofile=1058

When it comes to underemployment, nobody knows nothin'.

A University of Nevada, Reno, researcher says it's high time that management experts and academics pay substantially closer attention to underemployment, particularly because the recession may mean far more people are underemployed for far longer than they were in the past.

In fact, Frances McKee-Ryan, an assistant professor of management at UNR, says that for all the recent talk about underemployment, there's not much agreement about what it involves, let alone the size of the phenomenon.

A Gallup poll released last week, for instance, says the underemployment rate in Nevada runs somewhere between 21 and 25 percent of the workforce. The polling company lumps together the officially reported jobless rate — 13.7 percent in Nevada during January — with the number of people working less than 30 hours a week who want to be working full time to create its estimate of underemployment.

But in a paper published in “Journal of Management,” McKee-Ryan and fellow researcher Jaron Harvey of the University of Alabama note there's no agreed-upon strategy for counting the underemployed.

Does it include people who are overqualified — either by education or experience — for the jobs they now have? What about people who lost their jobs and now are forced to work in a lower-status position? People who think they are overqualified for the jobs they hold, no matter what the reality of their skills and education?