a thread for underemployment

I accidentally started this thread on IRE and it could not be moved so I am c/p'ing my posts and starting over. As I have done so many times! Sad lol.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underemployment

With the exception of the years I spent giving my heart and soul to the school that employed me for >10 years, I have been underemployed for the remainder of my adult working life. For the last 2 years, I have worked 2 jobs and I thought I had secured a third. but it fell through yesterday. The disappointment was crushing; it was a chance to work in my field and for reasons utterly beyond my control, it is not happening.

I could go on and on about the deleterious effects this has had on me, but it doesn't bring me any relief. There is a long-running thread for complaining about your coworkers, there's another one for complaining about working from home and I thought it only fair there be a dedicated thread for me and people like me who are trying to survive the wide and wtf world of underemployment. You're not alone <3

― Piggy Lepton (La Lechera), Saturday, September 2, 2023 9:27 AM (sixteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

whoops I didn't mean to put this in I Rate Everything -- will ask mod to move it to ILE

― Piggy Lepton (La Lechera), Saturday, September 2, 2023 9:27 AM (sixteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Found in the wiki posted above, what the actual fuck is this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underearners_Anonymous

It's an org designed to blame yourself for your underemployment?! That's monstrous. As if people aren't already doing that to themselves every exhausted waking minute.

― Piggy Lepton (La Lechera), Saturday, September 2, 2023 9:42 AM (one minute ago)

i definitely have struggled a lot with underemployment and underachievement in general for most of my life... it's a complicated thing. i don't know if i'm underemployed now, what the intersection of underemployment and "bullshit jobs" is. i _feel_ underemployed. i feel the same way i did when i worked as a "data entry clerk" for seven years, alternating between doing the work of a data analyst and listlessly scrolling through tables for hours on end trying to "look busy". when i started this job five years ago it felt meaningful and fulfilling... it doesn't now...

It's an org designed to blame yourself for your underemployment?! That's monstrous. As if people aren't already doing that to themselves every exhausted waking minute.

― Piggy Lepton (La Lechera)

ouch, the framing on that is fucked... i definitely look at it more from the standpoint of disability politics. it's complicated for me because the particular struggles i face with underemployment stem in large part from being methodically taught that i was a worthless human being... even though i'm in a society that measures our worth as human beings by how much money we make, i don't believe that, personally, i think that's outrageous and false. having said that, you know, "if i am not for myself, who will be for me", and i have trouble being for myself.

underemployment, i think there are lots of reasons for it, inside and outside people's control. in my case, for instance, i do think unacknowledged and unaddressed gender dysphoria was a major factor in my being underemployed for such a long time, and honestly there wasn't anything i could do about that, the material conditions were pretty much outside of my control. in theory i should be a lot more able to advocate for myself professionally now...

I've been underemployed for almost 22 years and I'm not sure I could reacclimate myself to fulltime work. I definitely don't have any desire to. When I left NoCal and the printing company I worked for, I took their best client (a livestock industry magazine) with me and did part time work for full time money until it shuttered at the end of 2021. That overlapped for about 1.5 years with my bartending career, which started in June 2020, right in the full bloom of covid, lol. Right now I work three bar shifts a week, and that plus my wife's Soc. Security miraculously covers our bills. (We don't have a mortgage/rent or car payment.) I made under $16K last year tending bar. (We won't discuss c@$h t!ps, mainly because they're shitty.) We have some savings because we live in just about the lowest COL area of the country (thanks, I hate it) and I was able to sock away a fair bit of income from the magazine client over two decades.

A friend of mine (who did the grind as a CPA then CFO of a largeish medical practice until he retired at 68) told me repeatedly that I needed to find other design clients, don't put my eggs in one basket, hustle and save etc, and I was just "ehhhh, but I don't wanna."

I spend a lot of time reading the internet and wondering what I'd do if I was rich, not so much time wondering how I could get rich.

I have never identified as a slacker or underachiever or whatever self-assigned epithet to connote a lack of ambition — I went to graduate school and worked my way through (full time at a website, coincidentally when I discovered Ilx) and wound up with a situation that was the best I’d ever known. I’m a hard worker and dedicated.
What I will admit to, however, is a lifelong fallacious belief that I should be able to achieve my dreams of my own accord, on my own juice, independently of any one’s assistance. And that’s because this is what I was taught and told.

I refuse to accept that I am somehow less worthy of healthcare, sick days, and professional satisfaction than the people who have secured those things. I’m not especially interested in publicly interrogating my failure to secure basic full time employment. Mostly I wonder if the underemployment will ever end or if this is my fate for life. The question of why is beyond me — there are personal and structural reasons — I just idly wonder if this is it.

Like is this as good as it’ll get for me??

I guess where I'm at is ... seeing a distinction between underemployment in terms of "wasting your brain/talents" and underemployment in terms of financial compensation. I feel like I'm kinda at a point where I'm actually not wasting my brain professionally ... or less of it, idk ... but the amount of money I make compared to people who do similar work for institutions / businesses ... is very sad, if I cared more about how much money I made. I think part of it is that I'm almost 50 and my brain hasn't adjusted to inflation lol.

though for me, some of it is a trade-off for autonomy. Still ... I had a client that I quit working for in the summer of 2022 ... they made multiple efforts to replace me, and paid people $65 and $75 an hour to do work I was charging $30/hr for ... and those people were incompetent or refused to do the actual job. Which ... really wasn't/isn't that hard and shouldn't require someone getting paid $75/hr to do because it's basically data entry + a bit of background knowledge and logic.

underemployment of skills/abilities and underemployment in terms of time seem like very different things to me but the wikipedia definition seems to somewhat group them, is the thread intended more towards one or the other (or other meanings covered under the term im missing maybe)

I feel like if you’re satisfied w the work situation you’ve reached, you’re not actually underemployed. It’s a choice. And everyone is free to choose the life that works for them. And that’s great.

For me at least it’s literally under-employment: desiring more/finding it impossible to reach. And feeling judged (rightfully or not) as a person who doesn’t want more as well as materially deprived of basic social safety net things like employer subsidized healthcare or the ability to be sick and not lose or imperiled my jobs. I realize this is bc of the country where I live but that’s not likely to change probably ever. So with that in mind, my main question for the cosmos is “is this it?”

And l mean GENUINELY satisfied not just saying so to avoid negative feelings or judgement.

Last I checked 70% of the college classes taught in the USA are taught by part time instructors/adjunct instructors/contingent faculty.

That’s me. It’s a massively overeducated underclass.

yeah it's super shitty. I guess I shouldn't complain ...

Acc to Google search for “underemployed government definition”

Underemployment is a measure of the total number of people in an economy who are unwillingly working in low-skill and low-paying jobs or only part-time because they cannot get full-time jobs that use their skills.

This is the definition I’ve been operating under in my estimation with focus on “use their skills” by which I mean professional skills (for example; not simply my natural tendency to enjoy working with people)

it all just seems so arbitrary. in terms of financial compensation i'm doing better than most of my friends. i'm working, i have benefits, i have access to medical care. i'm not in a structural deficit.

i got in a codependent relationship with someone who had a poverty mindset like me and we never spent any money on anything and even though we were underemployed, we were able to keep working full-time jobs and the money piled up. when we moved out to the west coast, there was a lot of sticker shock, it was a lot more expensive, but my dad had just died and left us a lot of money, and i was able to get a professional job and we bought a house. we could've had one where we came from, but my impression is that it was important to both of us to be able to get the hell out of there at any time, which eventually we wound up doing.

and then what? you know? where do you _go_ from there? when you're financially secure and emotionally insecure and every day feels like it could be the end of time? neither of us ever had much in the way of goals. the more we had, the more there was to lose. easier to do as little as possible and have as little as possible.

i don't know what it would _not_ look like to be underemployed. i could go through the grueling and demoralizing process of the job search, and maybe get somewhere with it, despite being possibly one of the least resilient people on the planet. i could get a job that supported me as a queer person, a job that didn't, i don't know, kill my soul, maybe. this job didn't kill my soul when i started it, and it does now, and i gave up everything else, walked away from everything else.

the truth is that right now i need a job i can do when i'm too depressed to get out of bed for two months, and that's the job i have now. i don't know if that's "underemployed" or not. maybe if i didn't have a soul-killing job i'd have been able to get out of bed regularly. if you already have money, they just fucking throw money at you, not enough to, like, help other people, not enough to make a positive change in the world. enough that it's a _burden_. enough to buy all those little distractions that maybe work for other people? but never really worked for me.

so when i had a job i didn't hate, it was easier for me to look for other jobs i didn't hate, easier for me to get those jobs. a situation like this, though? i don't know what it would look like to _not_ be underemployed. i can't imagine having a job that feels meaningful, a job that gave me a sense of _accomplishment_. i dread the weekend. it's a three-day weekend and i dread it, because it's one thing or the other. i'm worn down by the pretense of work, the hypervigilance in the event somebody sometime might actually want me to _do_ something, and when that's over and i don't even have that, i just have the exhaustion, the emptiness, and the sadness. work is a poor distraction, but it's still a better distraction than i can provide for myself. at work, i'm not _supposed_ to enjoy myself, and that makes it ok. i don't have to be happy. i'm getting paid. that's the important thing. i could have it worse. most of my friends have it worse.

i spent a long time trying to, i don't know, hope for change. thinking it can't go on like this forever, and it can't, it won't, but when it changes, it won't be on my timetable. there's nothing meaningful i can do to prepare for it.

when covid hit, i tried to find meaning outside of work, i tried to build community. the classic trans thing. dual-role. being underemployed in a skill sense was fine. it gave me the resources i needed to do the things i really cared about. all i had to do was not care about or value myself.

in retrospect it's pretty easy to see why that didn't work out.

i just have a lot of complex needs in terms of employment. a job that leaves me enough to live on, a job i can work and still respect myself at the end of the day, hell, a job i can _work_, where i have tasks to do and some combination of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation gets me to do them. i don't have that now, to be perfectly honest. i spend half my life in mental health treatment because i hate my fucking job. you'd think it would be easier for me to just find a new job, wouldn't you? i've seen the jobs out there. jobs that have meaning on purpose have a tendency to eat up every second of your spare time, to become your life.

i don't know anybody who has a job that meets all of these qualifications:

1. enough pay to live on
2. enough free time to pursue personal interests
3. doesn't leave you feeling like your soul has been sucked dry at the end of the day

maybe there are people who have jobs like that. i just don't know them.

I work for myself, tutoring music to school kids at a local Catholic school and from a home studio. I work around 20hrs, but charge enough that it gets me the equivalent of getting minimum wage for a full time job. My wife and I live within our means and don’t feel much financial pressure as a result. I did the first round of what would be considered graduate school in australia in philosophy/theology, got some top marks, but made a conscious choice that pursuing that was going to be a lot of crazy hard work for not much more security or financial payout than I am getting right now. So for my the equation was

+ enough to live on
+ enough free time to do what I enjoy
+ full autonomy, no boss
- not fully using my brain and so being bored for much of that 20hrs

Vs.

+ enough to live on
+ brain activated
- no free time
- demands of a boss
- move cities
- years more grinding before reaching the same financial place I’m currently at.

So I picked a version of underemployment (based on the wiki you linked) rather than slave towards a traditional employment that felt elusive and not quite worth it.

I acknowledge I’m a lucky one to have this choice. I think (for the moment) I’ve picked the “happier” path

Except for the year doing medical editing, when I felt like I was being fairly compensated and was doing somewhat specialized work that utilized my skills, I have been underemployed for my entire life. I have quite literally dug graves by hand and have also spent hours on tall orchard ladders contorting my body to prune massive weed plants. And that’s just the interesting stuff.

I currently teach the equivalent of 5/4 teaching load during the school year and work bar once or twice a week in the summer, when I also teach a summer course.

Do I think I will ever get a permanent teaching job? No, and I am always depressed about it. Am I also glad that at least I can spend my time reading weird stuff and talking with young people and getting paid for it? Absolutely.

I am trying to figure out ways to make it work, but it gets harder every year. I’m applying to teacher certificate programs so I can teach high school. I think that will change a lot about my life, but also make the money and solvency thing better for me.

i also will frankly say that being underemployed has made it much easier to achieve what I want artistically— fourth book coming out next year, major overview of first three books in a major publication this fall, readings at fancy galleries and etc.

the issue is that none of that achievement translates to fair compensation.

i also will frankly say that being underemployed has made it much easier to achieve what I want artistically— fourth book coming out next year, major overview of first three books in a major publication this fall, readings at fancy galleries and etc.

This is the thing with me, too. I am not "underemployed" in the hours-in-the-day sense; I work a full-time job (meaning I bill an employer for 8 hours a day M-F) and a part-time job (I bill an employer for 3 hours a day M-F); I work as a freelance ghostwriter and editor for a literary agency; I write for magazines and websites; I run my own website/newsletter which has a few paid subscribers; and I'm writing a book. Those latter three things give me creative/life satisfaction, and if I traded them in for a single full-time job that paid decent money I would be "financially stable" (which I already am, but, you know, more so) but miserable.

Part of me wants to do mentorship work, because I feel like 30 years of doing it has given me a lot of insight and advice I could pass on to people who want to become freelance hustlers, but again, hours in the day.

I spent 13 years in one job (2005-2018). Unfortunately since then I've been hopping, with periods of freelancing, consulting, underemployment, and a few short-tenure jobs.

Something went very wrong for me career-wise, and it wasn't just covid weirdness. There's, like, a fog that comes over my brain sometimes, and I can't focus. It seems to stem from anxiety and depression, which I am addressing.

I still have a killer resume, with 25 years of experience, and I interview well. There is a lot of demand in my field, so I'm able to get jobs quickly, but keeping them is another story.

Apparently I can be charming for an hour, but I have had some trouble sustaining it and delivering. For whatever reason.

Great thread and very appreciated. Hard to talk about this stuff sometimes.

My wife is currently babysitting part-time, the other part-time medical office admin job having ended when they went back to the office and hired someone else for 50 hours/week. It's been hard for her since losing the music industry job she had for 20+ years -- she has no degree but a lot of work experience, but record labels don't need sales people the way they did in the past. She's taken coding classes, art classes, swimming classes, just to fill her time and try to better herself, stay busy, but it's been incredibly hard at various points for her/us since 2018.

Myself, I'm a college drop-out who has worked in the used record business full time since 2005. I don't hate my job or myself but I don't make much money. Quality of life has improved since I switched from working in record retail to online sales - better pay, paid vacation, flexible hours, no punishing customers to deal with. But it's not satisfying, it does not feel like I am making any kind of headway in my life and what I want to do. What do I want to do? Fuck knows.

And still, we're on medicaid for health care and unless my partner finds work soon we will begin eating into what meager savings we have.

We have a spare bedroom in our apartment, and our summertime tenant just left to go back to school, so potentially we can rent it out again to help make ends meet. But obviously we'd rather not have a stranger in the apartment, so that's in a sort of limbo until we find someone we trust/like enough, who is in need of a room for whatever reason.

It's all very depressing but it helps in some ways to remember that other people are struggling here too, and that its not personal failing but the reality of living under capitalism. Hard, still.

Yes — I found myself wondering if I had made a huge mistake in identifying underemployment as the main issue making me feel like a piece of shit. I mean, it seems like lots of ppl are basically ok with it (even thriving within the chaos?) which is great but I can’t seem to manage it? I don’t feel like I’m thriving. Maybe the problem is me? Maybe I’m overreacting to something that other people don’t overreact to? It wouldn’t be the first time.

But then I remember that quite honestly there’s nothing wrong with me or my work ethic — this type of precarity feels unsustainable and as i get older I find myself wondering over and over “is this all there is??” like Peggy Lee. I’m not ok with it.

Yeah, the problem is definitely not you. And you're not overreacting - everyone has different thresholds for this kind of thing and different needs and wants that are not being satisfied. Other people get along fine in plenty of situations I think I would find intolerable, and just because other people might seem to be doing better, that doesn't make YOU the problem.

It is entirely unsustainable. I don't know about anyone else itt, but I can barely put away any money to save and since a significant chunk of my income is cash, am not going to be able to count on social security or anything else in my old age.

I've tried to pursue more creative endeavors the last few years (writing, making collages, playing RPGs) but honestly they just make me resent the struggle we all have against time. Working against time, as they say.

(To be clear there are plenty of things wrong w me but I don’t believe my lack of employability is primary among them)

Yes I don’t feel like my time is mine to use — thank you for the kind words too, it helps!!

I'm basically unemployable on paper, but actually very smart & a hard worker. But I'm almost 40 I'm not going back to undergrad now, getting into debt, just to have a marginally better chance of finding a marginally better job.

xp - the struggle is real bud <3

everyone has different thresholds for this kind of thing and different needs and wants that are not being satisfied.

yeah ... i thought about what you said about teaching and adjuncts and part of why I think that sucks is that the expectations were not met. Like, a generation ago (putting it that way for simplicity's sake) there was tenure and full-time employment and these were good jobs that you didn't really have to worry as much about re basic subsistence, and now ... no. Meanwhile people have spent years of their lives and lots of money to qualify for these jobs that have been taken away.

I, on the other hand, just didn't really have a plan for what exactly I was going to do to make a living or have as a career ... I just kinda "rode the whirlwind" and ended up in this weird place professionally and financially that doesn't entirely suck, but would probably not be feasible for someone who had kids or who wanted more security and less stress.

I, on the other hand, just didn't really have a plan for what exactly I was going to do to make a living or have as a career ... I just kinda "rode the whirlwind" and ended up in this weird place professionally and financially that doesn't entirely suck, but would probably not be feasible for someone who had kids or who wanted more security and less stress.

This is exactly how I feel. And of course the path I took doesn't exist anymore, so what I said upthread about wanting to potentially mentor people might be worse than useless. "Well, answer an ad in the print version of the New York Times from a porn magazine, you can be an editor there for 3-4 years with little or no experience, that'll be enough to get you on staff at a small music magazine, and after a few years doing that you can work for a record label doing editorial content for their website..."

in the past year or so a couple people asked me if I would mentor them and I was like ... no, I would not be good at that. Probably the biggest difference between me (at almost 50) and someone in their late 20s/early 30s professionally is that I finished college/grad school with only $6k in debt, and rents were fairly low at that time. I did a lot of volunteer work and pro bono stuff to "get my foot in the door" and "learn my trade" that younger generations can't really afford to do.

Like it is rare that someone wants me to mentor them or ask me to be on some professional development panel or workshop because what is desirable in "the field" is full-time job security/institutional support and higher income -- largely due to increases in cost of living and student debt ... and I am so not a model for that. Also the weird mix of things I do ... most people I talk to are interested in only doing "the creative stuff" as opposed to the other things that are "not fun" that enable me to do the creative stuff with a greater degree of autonomy than a lot of other people in the field.

a key element of capitalist societies is that the system needs to have a surplus of talent, more skills than it wants to employ in any given moment, because that keeps wages down

but it also wants people to feel guilty about not being used to the extent of their ability, because that guilt helps to drive down wages

that's generally true ... but there are jobs that more people want to do and jobs that are not as desirable. Thus "wages" (or supply/demand which translates to wages) get driven down because there is a surplus of people who want to do said jobs. Like, one thing I struggle with in terms of looking at things from a purely Marxist and/or structural approach is the fact that there are way more people who want to be musicians, writers, artists, actors, designers, etc. than there are "jobs" for them.

Like if structural engineering was as appealing a profession as being a musician, it would greatly reduce the cost of housing but that's not the case.

my point here sarah is if the system is structured to drive down wages for the jobs that are most essential to maintain a functioning society then it's the system that's the problem, not the individuals wracked with guilt trying to fit into that system

but for some reason that's not how it plays out at the moment, for you, for me, for anybody really

this piece from the 1950s is a really important pointer imo

https://archive.org/details/sparrowsnest-8962

I guess there's a question for me underlying underemployment, and it's a challenging one. What do I _deserve_ as an individual, what am I _worth_? What do we _all deserve_ as human beings, what are we worth?

We fall so grotesquely short of any reasonable answer on the second count that it's hard for me to even ask the first question. Sometimes I feel like the way we talk about "privilege" can be a little misleading. There's this distinction in poly between, I think, jealousy and envy, where jealousy is wanting something _instead_ of someone else - I guess "covetousness" is another way of looking at it - and envy is _also_ wanting something someone else have.

In the past, I was sort of taught to think of "privilege" in that sense, things other people have that they _don't deserve_. That's not how I view my own privilege these days. Like, as a trans woman, I'm extraordinarily privileged, by which I mean that I'm not homeless and I have access to healthcare. That's setting the bar real, real low, if you ask me, but that's where it's at, that's where we're at. My girlfriend was envious of my privilege when I was too depressed to get out of bed for two months and didn't lose my job. I guess that's one way of looking at it. I tend to look at it in terms of how hard I (and she) had to work to get any reasonable level of care for my illness, in terms of what I had to actually _do_ to get care. It's pretty monstrous what I had to do. Not monstrous of me. Monstrous of...

But what am I going to do, right? Every single one of us has individual stories of how we've been denied things that we have a fucking _right_ to by institutions of power that are either actively hostile or exhibit depraved indifference. Yet these injustices are beyond our ability to individually remediate, and the same forces that perpetrate these injustices work very, very hard to keep us from working together for our _collective_ benefit, work very hard to encourage us to be covetous of each other.

I'm envious of other people's privilege. Not covetous, but yeah, I'm a really envious person. Envious of the stupidest things. I feel like I don't have the right to be envious because other people are envious of me for things that are, at best, double-edged swords. I have a professional certification, I work a professional job, I have a fair amount of job security, I have access to resources that other people don't because of those things. It's a bullshit job that I've grown to loathe but am afraid of leaving, because I've seen what happens to my friends who lose their jobs.

62 quit, just over a year ago. She was underemployed and the job was going fine for a while but things got so bad so fast that she didn't have time to find another job before she quit. I've been there. I worked for a small company for seven years in Indiana, I was underemployed but it was the most stable long-term employment I had. I did that until the company got bought out by a minor member of a prominent Indiana Republican family who ran the company into the ground while embezzling from employees' paychecks, and then I quit, and then I couldn't find another job in Indiana for a year. Those are the choices a lot of the time, underemployed or... not even unemployed, right? Because when you _quit_ it's not unemployment. You're just not working. That's all.

People thought I could've worked harder trying to find a job. It was 2016. I was depressed and terrified. I went to see a psych, paid cash, told him about my anxieties, told him I didn't want any benzos because of my addiction, he gave me a benzo scrip and said to see him next week and he'd make everything all better. That's the resources I had available to me, in Indiana. Well, it was OK, I could afford to throw away a couple hundred dollars like that. Privilege.

The only question it's safe or healthy for me to _ask_ is the first question, the question of what I'm worth as an individual. Asking the other one just leads into a spiral of despair, doomscrolling, learned helplessness. I feel like the only way I can make the world a better place is to keep becoming a better person. It's not something I want to do. I'm tired of becoming a better person. Becoming a better person, though... that's a genuine fucking privilege. It's something I've chosen to do, over and over again, in a lot of ways. Even if I'm only doing it out of fear, which, most of the time, I am...

That's the insidious thing about underemployment. When I look at the radical changes I've made, mostly they're because the alternative I saw was a horrific one. I spent 20 years not graduating from college until a co-worker of mine had something bad happen to her and I looked at what happened to her and decided if I didn't change, if I didn't quit that job and get a degree, the same thing would happen to me. I spent six months not asking out the woman I wound up marrying until the dating site we were on crashed and I had to face the prospect of never talking to her again. I lived in Indiana, a state I hated, for ten fucking years until Donald Trump got elected and I panicked and said to myself, if I don't leave I'm going to _become like_ these people.

Not all of these fears were reasonable or well-grounded but it's the only way I ever changed in the past. Transition was the first thing in my life I ever did mostly because I _wanted_ to. Even then, even then it felt like fear. It felt like I transitioned because I was more afraid of _not_ transitioning. I still haven't managed to figure out the difference between fear and desire.

All this is definite First Question stuff. This isn't stuff other people have to deal with. It's a big part of my underemployment, though. I'm underemployed in large part because my sense of my own self-worth is extraordinarily low. I wanted to be a professional writer, for instance, but I wasn't ever able to do it because my self-esteem was too low. (My self-esteem is also too low for me to make it as a stand-up comedian, a profession that's fueled by low self-esteem and dick jokes.)

Anyway. It's a question that's at the uppermost of my mind right now, so I hope y'all don't mind my writing so much about it. I'm trying to value myself as a human being, but it's not something I've ever really done before and it's pretty difficult. I can't really think of anything else to do with my life at this point, though.

xp - idk what you are trying to convince me of? I am not arguing that the capitalist system is free from "blame"

i felt like you were arguing that some jobs are naturally, inevitably more desirable than others and i think that's only true if you ignore the structures that make that case?

like the joy of "creative" jobs is at least in part a construct of the economic system that restrics the number of jobs that seem creative

I am aware of those structures AND I am saying that some jobs are inevitably more desirable than others because human beings aren't blank slates.

that's generally true ... but there are jobs that more people want to do and jobs that are not as desirable. Thus "wages" (or supply/demand which translates to wages) get driven down because there is a surplus of people who want to do said jobs. Like, one thing I struggle with in terms of looking at things from a purely Marxist and/or structural approach is the fact that there are way more people who want to be musicians, writers, artists, actors, designers, etc. than there are "jobs" for them.

― sarahell

to me, it's creative work that most points the way to a post-capitalist future... the whole "supply/demand" model just fundamentally doesn't apply to creative work, imo. and i don't think it applies to bullshit jobs, either! what's the "fair market value" of me lying in bed for two months being paid to do a job that i _can_ do adequately while i'm suicidally depressed? at a certain point maybe it becomes beneficial to look at work from standpoints other than market value!

xp - Does the fact that someone wants to do "underpaid" creative work mean that they should suffer and not be able to afford food or medical care or safe, dignified housing? No. I don't believe that.

xxp

that's where i disagree because i don't think desirability exists outside of the context of the system that designates the job

i don't see a platonic world of jobs where some are always more or less desirable. don't pay and hours and conditions have more of an effect on desirability if we live in a world where earnings and free time are scarce? and wouldn't those things look different if precarity didn't exist?

But structurally, outside of capitalism, even ... there are things that more people are going to want to do than there are "essential" roles and there are going to be "essential" roles that are undesirable or at least are challenging enough to obtain competence/skill at that there is going to be a scarcity.

Off topic - but can underemployment figure in your personal life as well as work? On a particularly boring Sunday, that seems even more of a pressing problem to me: why don't I have more interesting facets of my personal non-work life ? Why haven't I developed those more?

i don't think desirability exists outside of the context of the system that designates the job

unless you are going to construct novel job descriptions like, 50% sewage treatment specialist / 50% DJ ... which, hey, why not? Maybe that's capitalist hegemony at work.

but what makes something desirable isn't just a personal, aesthetic connection? the remuneration, the social status, the degree of how much of yourself feels beaten down by a job - that's all stuff that impacts on what we think makes a job desirable, so if those things changed then our notion of desirability would change i think

that's not to say people wouldn't always value self-fulfilment or self-expression, it's just to say that those feelings aren't automatically tied to specific kinds of work because every kind of work is shaped by the economic conditions around it

apart from being slow to type out my replies here :D i think i'm saying in brief

"structurally, outside of capitalism, even ... there are things that more people are going to want to do than there are "essential" roles and there are going to be "essential" roles that are undesirable or at least are challenging enough to obtain competence/skill at that there is going to be a scarcity"

is doubtful to me because there's no work outside of a socioeconomic structure that makes it work

The other issue with "the system" is that certain jobs require particular systems and structures to be functional. And part of the appeal of creative work is the aspect of play and the relative autonomy of it. Like, if your job is in housing construction, you aren't going to have that because of what is required to build housing in a contemporary society.

did Robinson Crusoe hate mondays?

is a question

the idea that there's any kind of rational relationship between a job's "desirability" and compensation is kooky and demonstrably false looking at even a small data set

it's pure ideology

This turn of convo reminds me of one of my favorite lines from the Threepenny Opera, an inescapable truth: “the world is mean, and man uncouth.”

Brecht otm

What do I _deserve_ as an individual, what am I _worth_? What do we _all deserve_ as human beings, what are we worth?

Call me crazy but,
Housing
Healthcare
Education
Food
Clean water

To Kate's point, there are always people who have it worse than you and always people who have it better than you. The cliché is something like I wept because I had no shoes until I met a person who had no feet.

As I have said probably too many times, I have a child who will likely never speak, or work, or go to college, or date, or marry, or live independently, or be a parent. But at the same time, I know a girl his age who will likely never walk or feed herself or use a bathroom independently. It's not a competition; everyone is dealing with the situation in front of them, which is probably as it should be.

Re: creative work, there is the old IBM thing about how machines should work and people should think. Some aspects of automation are getting close to replacing human creative labor. Personally I don't expect my profession to exist in 25 years. But in the meantime, I am selling myself as a layer of discernment and judgment. I hope it will be enough.

Call me crazy but,
Housing
Healthcare
Education
Food
Clean water

I know it's simplistic but I really do think that a functional social contract/safety net would make it much easier for people to pursue the things they really want to pursue and are best equipped to do. So much of employment revolves around "stability" (which is mostly an illusion anyway, because jobs can disappear with no warning) and benefits, all to keep yourself fed and housed and with access to health care. If we provided those things as a societal baseline, it would dramatically change people's relationship to work. It doesn't mean everyone would magically find their dream job or that those jobs would pay enough etc., but it would take some of the endless grinding stress away.

It's the biggest thing missing in all the buzzy talk around "entrepreneurship," it's presented like it's this big bold scary thing to step out on your own but that's only because we've made it actually pretty risky in all sorts of ways. We don't have to, that's a choice. At the same time, not being able to offer decent health insurance is a major drag on a lot of small nonprofits that do really good work and where a lot of people would probably like to work because of the sense of mission, but they can't afford to.

Call me crazy but,
Housing
Healthcare
Education
Food
Clean water

― ian

you're crazy. where's "gay sex"? i'm not going to accept a list of what we have a birthright to as human beings that doesn't include "gay sex". and don't try to tell me "oh but i'm straight", doesn't matter! i'm asexual, and they can have my right to queer debauchery when they pull it from my cold, dead...

well, shit. OK, NOT EVEN THEN.

i don't want to super get into direct anticapitalism, but i am opposed to capitalism, i am opposed to "full employment", i am opposed to any ideology that someone's value as a human being ought to be dependent on performing activities that provide _value_ as measured by capitalist markets.

i would be a better, happier, more functional, and more fulfilled human being if i had, you know, freedom from want and freedom from fear. if i could spend my time pursuing those things which _i_ found of most value without having to worry about doing things i hate for companies i hate in order to survive. so yeah, for me, the ideal job wouldn't be one where i was "fairly compensated" for doing something i loved, but some sort of gay luxury communism thing where people paid me money because i have inherent worth and value as a human being and i did the stuff i wanted to do for fucking free.

are there jobs that need to be done by humans? yes. are there enough meaningful jobs to reach "full employment"? no. if someone wants to be a surgeon, by all means, they should be rich as croesus, if that's what they're into. i fully believe that, absolutely surgeons should have more money than me. is my work of any more value than that of a greeter at wal-mart? no. no, i don't think it is. why? because our jobs are both fundamentally _bullshit_. these fucking assholes twist their heads into knots trying to justify jobs that serve no purpose other than to perpetuate an outmoded and unsupported ideology that is directly detrimental to most of us who suffer under its yoke.

by the way, if you ever need a t-slur with borderline personality disorder to make incendiary speeches denouncing capitalism, give me a call. until then, i'm gonna play zelda or something.

i think that frankly, part of my issue is that I am very resolutely “fuck a fuckin’ job” in the depths of my soul. it might explain why i am not great at getting jobs!!

meeee too. big love to yours and kate's posts in this great thread.

The framing of underemployment in the OP looks a bit past its sell by date. At a time when our focus is now increasingly on likely impending ecological catastrophes caused by industrialisation, maybe we need less employment across the board - and less growth - before capitalism eats the natural world up.

in the meantime, people need to eat and there is no “full communism” button so maybe shut the fuck up

like, what a patronizing, bullshit thing to write

thank you table -- i read that post and was like "is this person telling me to drop dead or ??"

i don't see what it adds to the conversation to focus on systems that (in all honesty) won't change before we all die from old age or overwork. i just read an email about the job i thought i had for a week and it said i was deemed ineligible for the job bc "it would have tipped you into fulltime employment" and in my head i was like "yes that is why i wanted it" It didn't come with any of the benefits of ft employment but it would have been suitable hours and money. they "overlooked" the person who had been doing exactly this for years until he moved on to...full time employment and the job became available. Or not!!

ugh

i’m sorry, LL. that sucks!

as far as the post in question, the idea that LL (or any of the other people posting their stories to this thread) could possibly have a major effect on strategies for degrowth or depopulation is ridiculous. any of us starving or becoming homeless isn’t going to do much to save the planet, but it will cause us a great deal of misery. perhaps the offending poster could turn their attention to those with resources and the governments that aid and abet capital’s cancerous growth and role in ecocide— scolding individuals and acting like an asshole is not the way to go!

. The framing of underemployment in the OP looks a bit past its sell by date.

Just for clarification it I was referring to the Wikipedia definition of underemployment - no criticism of LL intended.

that's fine -- i still don't think it's helpful to glibly blame systems in a space where people are talking about their individual issues with surviving under those systems.

like it's easy to sit here and blame capitalism and i have done more than my share of it but that makes no difference in my individual life experience or the individual life experiences of people who are not able to enjoy the fruits of full time employment *in their field* *using their professional skills*

this situation at my workplace felt like i was drowning, briefly came up for air and tasted the life-sustaining properties of air, and then had my head pushed or my legs pulled back underwater because in the water's estimation i don't deserve air. if i dwelled on how bad it makes me feel, i would be even more miserable than i am!

Out of curiosity, if compensation were exactly the same, would most people prefer to work a steady 3-6 hours a day (the supposed maximum productive range for people), 4-5 days a week, or do one month of hell a year with the rest of it completely free and clear?

are my basic needs covered under either scenario? (including employer-subsidized healthcare)?

if so, i don't care honestly

i would do either, though i think 3-6 hours/day 4-5x/week is technically going to be more time spent working than one difficult month because no one can exist for a full month without rest/sleep so i think that would be the obviously easier choice. but a few hours a day sounds like more of a sustainable life. i am not built to be a lobsterman!

omg hell month sign me up

ultimately though i don't think the answer to that question matters very much

omg hell month sign me up

there's reality shows about fishing for crab in Alaska, see if it'll work for you

When I am working, I check email early (like 8) and see if there's anything I need to address immediately. Then I may do a bit of concentrative work in the middle of the day. Then I just monitor things through evening.

I could not do my sort of work in a hell month (as these are collaborative and iterative projects with deadlines spread throughout the year).

I have tried to float my idea of hybridness (in the office maybe 10 - 2, otherwise just being responsive when needed). No one so far has bitten. Most companies structure hybridness as "X days a week," where a "day" means an eight-hour day.

I always imagined movie-making (and I guess a lot of creative endeavors) to be closer to a hell month scenario with droughts in between but apparently a lot of it is just waiting around.

ive learned that a hell day affects me a lot longer than a day, hell month can shove it

there's reality shows about fishing for crab in Alaska, see if it'll work for you

Seems that honeymoon is over: https://alaskapublic.org/2022/12/19/alaska-crab-fishery-collapse-seen-as-warning-about-bering-sea-transformation/

And the Ukraine war has the arse gone out of the Newfoundland crab market, price-wise. Have to figure another plan.

also everything in Alaska is so expensive that the “excellent money” in those jobs often goes to rent, food, etc.

not if you fly in for season and gone again tbf which a lot of that type of work involves

but then a lot of these guys do a few "seasons" or follow orher different quota seasons around places or have other work

im not sure its the example sought tbh

yeah, i mean if you are out on a boat during the season you can make some serious money, but there are flights, and also the time needed on land during break days— and really being on the boat is the only job that’s worth it, i know tons of people who’ve done canning and boxing at the fishhouses up there and it is miserable work and many people don’t really make enough to justify the hassle.

to state the obvious: going to Alaska to do heavy labor for a month is not a cure for underemployment nor is it an option for most people. Congrats and kudos to all able bodied men able to do hard labor for a month but that’s a small proportion of people.

Kate Beaton's Ducks is about her mostly miserable time in a oil fracking camp doing mostly office work to pay off student debts. There's a lot of "did you really go to college for this?" in it and some super-dark episodes but... she did end up paying off her student debt.

to state the obvious: going to Alaska to do heavy labor for a month is not a cure for underemployment nor is it an option for most people. Congrats and kudos to all able bodied men able to do hard labor for a month but that’s a small proportion of people.

― Piggy Lepton (La Lechera), Wednesday, September 6, 2023 8:08 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

maybe you could lay out everything we are and are not allowed to talk about itt?

i keep typing up posts based on all the interesting things that ppl are saying but it seems like you have a particular vision for the thread so i don't want to step on your toes

This derail is right up there with “just get a different type of job if you can’t get a ft job in your field” or “just take the stairs/stop buying starbux” type of bs

I don’t have a vision or parameters aside from please be respectful toward those of us who are underemployed

Anything not universally applicable is viewed as a direct insult to those to whom it does not apply. ("Breathing air is good!" "Yeah, well, some of us have COPD or black lung, you elitist prick!" "Drinking water is good and life-sustaining!" "What about those of us with crippling hydrophobia? What about the children of Flint, Michigan?")

Whatever — if you can’t think about or be minimally conscious of where you’re saying what you’re saying or to whom I can’t help you.

Posting to a thread for hydrophobes with “water is good!” = who does this???

im not sure how we can determine in advance what range of roles or specific types of work wouldnt exclude some section of society, it seemed quite an unfair jump to make given the discussion was a natural offshoot of a theoretical question raised on the "underemployed in terms of time spent working" aspect imo

but i think we had stopped discussing it anyway.

im interested in the other type of underemployment (if im right that theres a time/ability split in the two main usages of the term but again i may be wrong here). does it cover "i can do more than i am showing here" or is it itt more held to be "there is not enough demand for the talents i have/the work i would like to do?

again im not very sure exactly how the term is being defined for thread purposes and the definitions in the wikipedia page dont imo really clear things up?

Posted this early in thread to clarify


Acc to Google search for “underemployed government definition”

Underemployment is a measure of the total number of people in an economy who are unwillingly working in low-skill and low-paying jobs or only part-time because they cannot get full-time jobs that use their skills.

This is the definition I’ve been operating under in my estimation with focus on “use their skills” by which I mean professional skills (for example; not simply my natural tendency to enjoy working with people)

To clarify what I personally meant by it and how the US government measures underemployment

ty i had missed that

This derail is right up there with “just get a different type of job if you can’t get a ft job in your field” or “just take the stairs/stop buying starbux” type of bs

I don’t have a vision or parameters aside from please be respectful toward those of us who are underemployed

i also think ll is fostering a really good convo here, i think there's a good discussion to be had about the crab fishing industry but it's not really what i'm here for fwiw

I have gravitated towards the “hell month” type work in the course of my life… vs having to do work that is bullshit several hours a day for an indefinite duration… now I have more of the long slog type work and I feel underwater

It seems like most jobs don't have a good path towards seniority -- the bad version is you're always treading water or on the edge of being let go and the "good" version is you get pushed into management instead of doing the thing you've gotten really good at, because there's no way they can just pay you more for being extra good at it. Has any industry lucked upon a good setup? It's definitely not academia...

the bad version is you're always treading water or on the edge of being let go and the "good" version is you get pushed into management instead of doing the thing you've gotten really good at, because there's no way they can just pay you more for being extra good at it. Has any industry lucked upon a good setup?

For many years this was me - advocating for staying put and getting better at doing my role, rather than being pushed into managing that thing. Every time someone offered to hire me an assistant, I said something along the lines of "how about you hire me a boss instead?" only more politely. The term in my professional orbit is "individual contributor." Lots of people just want to be a kickass individual contributor without any urge for promotion/advancement. For a long time (as a consultant) I got away with it.

But (as noted) I lost my way a few years ago and haven't performed up to my usual standard in quite a while. I will still probably get away with it, but my confidence has been shaken by my recent slide into underemployment.

Anything not universally applicable is viewed as a direct insult to those to whom it does not apply. ("Breathing air is good!" "Yeah, well, some of us have COPD or black lung, you elitist prick!" "Drinking water is good and life-sustaining!" "What about those of us with crippling hydrophobia? What about the children of Flint, Michigan?")

― read-only (unperson), Wednesday, 6 September 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Where is poster "the late great" to castigate posters for displaying a minimum of literacy and reading comprehension?

*not

Water not being at all accessible to many people is a problem. Sorry you think this fact is only ever used as a gotcha in the online discussions you've seen.

how do you even move on from a post like that? thread is over now

Water, him no get enemy