Brynne VanHettinga has had a diverse career that has permitted observation of job market deficiencies from a variety of perspectives.

As a Worker. In the beginning, Brynne was like many young adults starting out, working multiple unrelated part-time jobs to make ends meet and very quickly discovering there was no future. It was obvious that education was the only way up and out.  Interested in everything, but passionate about nothing, Brynne studied chemistry while working in a hospital lab, then studied foreign languages in the hopes of being able to see the world. She missed passing the foreign service exam by only three points, although was eventually invited to retake it thanks to a class action suit against the State Department. By this time, Brynne had abandoned pursuit of work involving foreign assignments and had settled on a degree in Economics and Finance.

The jobs in the private sector that required a college degree were only marginally better. There was (sometimes) health insurance and more regular hours. For the most part, you could get by with only one job, but–with school loans to pay and the ever-rising cost of housing–there was not a lot of money left at the end of the month. It also appeared that there wasn’t much room for growth and upward mobility–especially if you were a woman without the “right” connections. A female friend who worked as a mid-level manager at a bank described how she had trained persons (all men) who now occupied positions as Vice-Presidents, yet was never able to rise to this level herself. But the problem was more than just the proverbial glass ceiling. Long before former President Clinton said so in a campaign speech, Brynne realized that most of us were working harder for less. She wrote her first paper on underemployment as an undergraduate, which analyzed the (even then measurable) diminishing returns to education, transition to a service economy, and the wave of massive corporate layoffs that occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

As an Advocate of Worker Rights. Next stop was law school, where Brynne served as a volunteer in the San Francisco-based Employment Law Center/Workers Rights Project. Most of the center’s clients were ethnic minorities or immigrants who had been subjected to grossly unfair (and sometimes actually illegal) treatment at work. Often, the student advocates were unable to help their clients, instead directing them to resources that might keep body and soul together, as well as regain trust in the promise of America. Later, as a practicing attorney who represented families and employees, Brynne became acutely aware of how the regulatory structure to protect workplace rights was either deliberately underfunded or rendered toothless in operation. This was compounded by evidence that both legislatures and judiciary (particularly at the federal level) were hostile to the rights of workers and their attempts to be heard.

As a Researcher. Frustrated with the ineffectiveness of legal remedies for workers, Brynne went back to school for a Ph.D. The goal was to develop higher level analytic skills in order to better understand why work wasn’t working for so many people. While occasional, sporadic academic studies continued to address underemployment, it is an issue that has largely been ignored by mainstream economists and the popular media. But, if we ever hope to fix the broken “job market,” we will have to confront the uncomfortable evidence.