Refers to a measure of the number of individuals in an economy who are unwillingly working in lower-skill and/or lower-paying jobs, or who are employed part-time because they cannot obtain full-time jobs that use their skills. Both underemployment and unemployment are counted in U.S. government reports in order to provide a truer picture of the health of the job market. The causes of underemployment include economic recessions, rapidly changing workforce needs, lack of alignment between employer needs and education credentialing programs, impacts on hiring that occurred with COVID, and demographic impacts broadly and in specific industry sectors (equal opportunity for many populations – race/ethnicity, gender, age, disability).
There are three types of underemployment:
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