Employment Abbreviations

What is Underemployment?

Underemployment is a condition in which a certain job is performed without the need for professional qualification, receiving, for this, very low wages.

Underemployment can also be considered work that is below the employee’s qualifications, being obliged to perform tasks below his professional instruction. Often, the lack of job offers for qualified professionals forces them to look for and fill vacancies in underemployment.

Typically, 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, etc.

Underemployment conditions are intrinsically related to unemployment, forcing workers to look for jobs that can only satisfy their survival needs, with no prospects for professional growth.

As they receive low wages, the underemployed live with poor quality of life, often being forced to live in slums or other places with poor sanitation and little security.

However, underemployment can present itself as an alternative for individuals who do not have any type of professional qualification, but who wish to earn as little as possible to survive, even in precarious conditions.

Searches for under-employment are 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 not getting a job in his area, works as a bricklayer, porter, day laborer, garbage collector, or doing any other type of service that is available.

Underemployment in Brazil

In Brazil, 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 looking for 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 workers in the commerce.

Unemployment

Unemployment is the lack of a job, considered by many scholars as a “social disease”.

An individual who is in the “active group”, that is, of age to be in the labor market, but does not have a job is called unemployed.

There are four main forms of unemployment: seasonal, cyclical, transitional and structural.

The most serious, and which generally forces people to look for underemployment, is structural unemployment. This type of job shortage occurs when there is no demand or few service offerings for a given workforce.

List of Acronyms Related to Employment