"Underemployed"

[TheDev]

I hear the media making comments about the percentage of people who are unemployed. What the hell does that even mean? These people should be happy they even have a job at all in this economy. Any ungrateful person can claim to be "underemployed" because they think that they deserve more money. Who's to say that they actually deserve more?

 

[Infohawk]

Is this a case where you're complaining about complainers? Underemployment generally means you have something specific that you could point to that would get you a higher-level job in a healthier economy. Someone without a HS degree working as a laborer is not underemployed. Someone with a PhD in chemistry working at a car wash is underemployed. Caring requires that you have sympathy or empathy.

PS I hope you don't believe in a just world fallacy.

 

[mshan]

IMO, not cool line of attack.

Irrespective of idealogy or party affiliation, if you are actually one of those who are unemployed or underemployed, the "horrible" economy is painfully real.

Ben Bernanke did say he had a hypothesis that surge in new jobs numbers last fall was a one time reversal of brutal layoffs that occurred in winter of 2008 (when companies said they had absolutely no visibility about future and cut back to the bone just to maximize likelihood that they would survive through current crisis, e. g. conserving cash if they lost line of credit with bank because that bank was also scared about going out of business or not having enough money to just keep doors open).

Everyone likes to blame crash on lending to subprime borrowers, but I suspect real problem was that shadow banking system (http://www.zerohedge.com/news/verge-historic-inversion-shadow-banking) froze up (Lehman bankruptcy was apparently going smoothly until there was hiccup in some senior unsecured debt (?) and suddenly hedge fund types suddenly found billions vaporized out of thing air and created financial panic / credit freeze that crashed the stock market and economy (http://newsandinsight.thomsonreuter...d_the_great_Wall_St_re-hypothecation_scandal/) IIRC, as Frontline's episode on the financial crisis said (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/money-power-wall-street/), their models didn't incorporate possibility of 25% drop in value of the shaky collateral (subprime debt) upon which whole intertwined shadow banking system had been built up upon.

"But you need to notice that the Japanese bank collapse looked very different from what is going on in America now. The Japanese bank collapse was not a collapse of funding – it was a collapse of asset values and solvency. [Exceptions noted.]

American financial institutions are now having wholesale funding runs (or finding wholesale funding is unavailable which amounts to the same thing). Japanese financial institutions did not need wholesale funding (most had deposits) and hence by-and-large did not have runs. [There were some institutions such as the long-term-credit banks and similar institutions which had wholesale funding – they were effectively nationalised.]

Many Japanese regional banks (Nishi Nippon for example) were breathtakingly insolvent at the height of the crisis but they remained liquid because they had plenty of deposits. Because they remained liquid they never actually failed"


http://brontecapital.blogspot.com/2008/07/deflation-and-bank-bailouts-in-japan.html

IIRC, Germans have very low unemployment, but that is because everyone decided that part -time job for all was better than some having full time job and others having no job.

Economy appears to be on the mend, but rate of recovery is painfully slow, and not palapable to many.

Morningstar economist Bob Johnson has said rate of recovery from this recession (probably more accurately described as Bush near Depression) is only half as fast as other "generic" recesssions, but also that recoveries from those type of recessions is typically driven by 1) housing, and 2) government spending...

He has also said that small and medium size businesses are hiring, but that large corporations are pausing (i. e. they are shifting workers around from division to division as need be rather than laying off people because they now realize that while it easy to fire, if business picks up later, it may be very hard to find someone with the skills required for job opening they have).

 

[nehalem256]

"Underemployed" is when you have a master's degree in art history and the best job you can find is folding clothes at JC Penny.

 

[TheDev]

"Underemployed" is when you have a master's degree in art history and the best job you can find is folding clothes at JC Penny.

LOL! I know, right? That is a perfect example of how it is the fault of the individual, not the economy.

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

"Underemployed" is when you have more education and experience than any of the managers you've worked for in the last ten years.

 

[MovingTarget]

"Underemployed" is when you have a master's degree in art history and the best job you can find is folding clothes at JC Penny.

Replace Art History with Mathematics and you are getting closer to the idea. There are a lot of highly educated people in the sciences that are most definitely unemployed/underemployed. On a related note, you are a tool if you believe that the Arts are not important for the well being of a society.

"Underemployed" is when you have more education and experience than any of the managers you've worked for in the last ten years.

Damn straight. High schoolers shouldn't have to compete for jobs with those having Bachelors degrees.

 

[Dr. Detroit]

Underemployed also means those who are working part time and would prefer to be working full time.

You are employed if you work and do not count in the unemployed status so they use underemployed for these cases as well.

Underemployment can refer to:

"Overqualification" or "overeducation", or the employment of workers with high education, skill levels, and/or experience in jobs that do not require such abilities.[2] For example, a trained medical doctor who works as a taxi driver would experience this type of underemployment.

"Involuntary part-time" work, where workers who could (and would like to) be working for a full work-week can only find part-time work. By extension, the term is also used in regional planning to describe regions where economic activity rates are unusually low, due to a lack of job opportunities, training opportunities, or due to a lack of services such as childcare and public transportation.

"Overstaffing" or "hidden unemployment" (also called "labor hoarding"[3]), the practice in which businesses or entire economies employ workers who are not fully occupied---for example, workers currently not being used to produce goods or services due to legal or social restrictions or because the work is highly seasonal.

 

[nehalem256]

"Underemployed" is when you have more education and experience than any of the managers you've worked for in the last ten years.

Right. If you have been "underemployed" for 10 years, it sounds more like the problem is with you and you have an inflated opinion of yourself.

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

Right. If you have been "underemployed" for 10 years, it sounds more like the problem is with you and you have an inflated opinion of yourself.

And you can add lack of knowledge about the hospitality industry to the long list of things you're clueless about.

 

[nehalem256]

And you can add lack of knowledge about the hospitality industry to the long list of things you're clueless about.

Feel free to enlighten us as to how I am wrong.

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

Feel free to enlighten us as to how I am wrong.

You can start with anytime you post. With regards to the hospitality industry, there is a curious dichotomy between different segments of food service. It's rather like typecasting for actors. The hiring managers tend to think there are unique factors which make their particular segment "special" and tend to penalize those who do not have experience in that particular segment or, who have experience in a segment they deem some how lacking. Retail grocery stores almost never hire anyone who has hotel experience. Healthcare almost never hire anyone with restaurant experience. Hotels almost never hire anyone with institutional experience and, so on. Add to that the peculiar demands of corporate food service in which, length of time working for a particular corporation is deemed more important than knowledge or experience. Then you've got the whole political Chef versus working Chef set of prejudices. The final icing on the cake is that America doesn't really care about what they eat and tends to look down on people in my industry even though most are incapable of feeding themselves. That is why I am underemployed.

 

[nehalem256]

You can start with anytime you post. With regards to the hospitality industry, there is a curious dichotomy between different segments of food service. It's rather like typecasting for actors. The hiring managers tend to think there are unique factors which make their particular segment "special" and tend to penalize those who do not have experience in that particular segment or, who have experience in a segment they deem some how lacking. Retail grocery stores almost never hire anyone who has hotel experience. Healthcare almost never hire anyone with restaurant experience. Hotels almost never hire anyone with institutional experience and, so on. Add to that the peculiar demands of corporate food service in which, length of time working for a particular corporation is deemed more important than knowledge or experience. Then you've got the whole political Chef versus working Chef set of prejudices. The final icing on the cake is that America doesn't really care about what they eat and tends to look down on people in my industry even though most are incapable of feeding themselves. That is why I am underemployed.

"Underemployed" is when you have more education and experience than any of the managers you've worked for in the last ten years.

It doesnt explain the bolded part. I mean unless you keep skipping from job to job. Because otherwise you would have built the necessary experience with the same industry. And with the same company.

And also interesting enough the bolded above is also how unions normally work :hmm:

And I think the problem is American's are a little to good about feeding themselves