If you are like most of us, you grew up being told to do well in school so you could get a good job. Then, once a good job was secured, you could advance in your career through a combination of loyalty and hard work. The promise was that if you had the requisite amount of smarts (education) and diligence, you would be rewarded with a meaningful and stable career. As most of us have figured out by now, those days are over–if they ever even existed at all.
Yet, what most of us do when we are un- or underemployed is engage in frantic attempts to fix ourselves. We endlessly tweak our resumes and social media platforms, we attend every “networking” event that is logistically feasible, we agonize over who we should contact and how (not wanting to appear needy) in order to find any lead to the next job. We might even buy a new suit or pay for a haircut and color that is more expensive than our “usual.” If a new (or better) job continues to be elusive, many of us will go back to school (and incur debt to do so) to obtain newer credentials or upgrade old ones. In essence, we believe that if we can conform ourselves to the dictates of the “market,” a good job will be forthcoming. Which does indeed happen for some people who spend enough time and effort searching, which further fuels the same activity among everyone else. What almost no one ever seems to do is apply the same kind of exacting scrutiny to the job market.
Academic research has identified four basic constructs of labor inadequacy: unemployment, involuntary part-time employment (both forms of not enough work), inadequate wages, and over-education (both forms of inferior work). The problem with the job market is not only that there aren’t enough jobs, but that there aren’t enough good jobs. From an analytical standpoint, is the problem simply a matter of too many job seekers, insufficient employer demand, or are there deeper structural problems with the labor market? Most of you are probably aware of the massive loss of jobs created by corporate mergers, offshoring of jobs as a result of globalization, and technological displacement. In addition to these trends, research has identified the following developments which have made decent employment even scarcer:
* The jobs that are being created are increasingly part-time, temporary or contingent. The extreme version of this is platform-based micro-tasks, sometimes called the “gig” economy. While gig work holds the promise of increased flexibility, its participants are deprived of traditional legal labor protections as well as social safety net protections like unemployment, workers compensation, and group health insurance. Additionally, gig workers must spend a lot of unpaid time looking for work, bidding for work, and managing unpredictable cash flow.
* A bifurcation of traditional jobs into “core” functions–which are better paid and have some semblance of security and career progression pathways, and “peripheral” functions–which are lower paid, impermanent, and often without benefits and pathways to upward mobility. This bifurcation into “good jobs” and “bad jobs,” regardless of the particular skills of the jobholder, has implications for the increasing income and wealth gaps that have been documented by economists.
What is happening is that most jobs are deliberately designed so that the gains and efficiencies are expropriated by those at the top while the inefficiencies and disutilities are externalized onto working people. Moreover, we have been indoctrinated to accept this situation by an ideology designed to convince us that this is both “natural” and good for everyone. Frustrated and disillusioned, many of us continually pursue additional credentials, particularly those we have been told have value in the “job market” in the hopes of gaining a better position in the job queue. Yet, the knowledge that we need to understand (and challenge) the system as well as to build better lives for ourselves is harder to find.
Our work–what we do to earn a living–is a political and moral issue as well as an economic one. We cannot live in a democracy if we work in a dictatorship. Moreover, our work should serve either our fellow beings or a higher purpose. Does our work even serve us by allowing us to live the life we want to? This does not necessarily mean the accumulation of material wealth, but whether our work allows us to express our talents and serve the greater good while providing a reasonable living. Does it allow us to build a life outside of work by leaving us time and energy for family, friends, and community involvement? Do we work at a “job” that seems to rob us of our higher level needs (and maybe even a lot of our lower ones), or does our work matter and provide fulfillment?
The Great Jobs Deception is based on a doctoral dissertation that analyzed underemployment among 596 college-level and higher professionals in STEM, health care, legal, and academic professions. Both statistics and stories were used to describe the nature and extent of underemployment among this demographically and geographically dispersed group. Some of the participants were new graduates, while others had been occupied in their professions for years and even decades. Thus, there was no one-size-fits-all manifestation of underemployment. If there was a common thread among the respondents who experienced underemployment (some 60% were underemployed at some point in their career, but not necessarily so at the time of the survey), it was a sense that the “system” was not letting people know the truth about the realities of specific job markets. There was also a sense of pessimistic futility, as professional employees are now experiencing some of the angst and alienation that previously had been associated with industrial manufacturing work.
