Underemployment is a condition in which determined work is performed without the need for professional qualification., receiving, for this, very low wages.
Underemployment can also be considered work that is below the qualifications of the employee, who is obliged to perform tasks inferior to his professional education. Often, the lack of job offers for qualified professionals forces them to look for and fill vacancies in underemployment.
Usually, underemployment is surrounded by illegalities, such as very low wages, without guarantees and protections for the employee, or labor rights, such as vacation, thirteenth, retirement and etc.
Underemployment conditions are intrinsically related to the unemployment, forcing workers to look for jobs that can only satisfy their survival needs, without prospects for professional growth.
Because they receive low wages, the underemployed live with a poor quality of life, being often forced to live in slums or other places with poor sanitation and little security.
Learn more about the meaning of Slum.
However, underemployment can present itself as an alternative for individuals who do not have any type of professional qualification, but who want to earn as little as possible to survive, even if under conditions precarious.
Searching for underemployment is also very common when people immigrate to other countries. For example, a lawyer who wants to live in the United States and who in order to survive while he can't get a job in his area, works as a bricklayer, janitor, day laborer, garbage collector, or doing any other type of service available.
Underemployment in Brazil
In Brazil, as well as in several Latin American countries, underemployment is very common due to the high unemployment rate or the few job offers for qualified professionals.
With the intention of escaping unemployment, people end up seeking informal jobs as a solution to the lack of better opportunities.
What predominates in Brazil are jobs that require low education, but a certain degree of experience, especially for informal commerce workers.
Unemployment
O unemployment it is the lack of a job, considered by many scholars as a "social illness".
An individual who is in the "active group", that is, who is old enough to be in the labor market, but who does not have a job, is called an unemployed person.
There are four main forms of unemployment: seasonal, cyclical, transitional and structural.
The most serious one, and one that generally forces people to look for underemployment, is structural unemployment. This type of lack of work happens when there is no demand or few service offers for a certain workforce.