Underemployment

Underemployment is the underuse of a worker because a job does not use the worker's skills, is part-time, or leaves the worker idle. Examples include holding a part-time job despite desiring full-time work, and overqualification, in which the employee has education, experience, or skills beyond the requirements of the job. Underemployment has been studied from a variety of perspectives, including economics, management, psychology, and sociology. In economics, for example, the term underemployment has three different distinct meanings and applications. All of the meanings involve a situation in which a person is working, unlike unemployment, where a person who is searching for work cannot find a job. All meanings involve under-utilization of labor which is missed by most official (governmental agency) definitions and measurements of unemployment. In economics, underemployment can refer to: "Overqualification", or "overeducation", or the employment of workers with high education, skill levels, or experience in jobs that do not require such abilities. For example, a trained medical doctor with a foreign credential 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" or "disguised unemployment" (also called "labor hoarding"), 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. Underemployment is a significant cause of poverty because although the worker may be able to find part-time work, the part-time pay may not be sufficient for basic needs.

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Natural rate of unemployment

The natural rate of unemployment is the name that was given to a key concept in the study of economic activity. Milton Friedman and Edmund Phelps, tackling this 'human' problem in the 1960s, both received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for their work, and the development of the concept is cited as a main motivation behind the prize. A simplistic summary of the concept is: 'The natural rate of unemployment, when an economy is in a steady state of "full employment", is the proportion of the workforce who are unemployed'.

Frictional unemployment

Frictional unemployment is a form of unemployment reflecting the gap between someone voluntarily leaving a job and finding another. As such, it is sometimes called search unemployment, though it also includes gaps in employment when transferring from one job to another. Frictional unemployment is one of the three broad categories of unemployment, the others being structural unemployment and cyclical unemployment.

Structural unemployment

Structural unemployment is a form of involuntary unemployment caused by a mismatch between the skills that workers in the economy can offer, and the skills demanded of workers by employers (also known as the skills gap). Structural unemployment is often brought about by technological changes that make the job skills of many workers obsolete. Structural unemployment is one of three categories of unemployment distinguished by economists, the others being frictional unemployment and cyclical unemployment.

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