Slipping into and out of underemployment: another disadvantage for nonmetropolitan workers?

摘要

Underemployment, which goes beyond unemployment to include the working poor, discouraged workers, and involuntary part-time workers, is a useful measure of employment hardship. The paper argues that underemployment should be included with other conventional indicators of the disadvantaged circumstances of rural (nonmetro) labour, in terms not only of prevalence, but also of the likelihood of transitions into and out of underemployment. It takes advantage of the quasi-longitudinal nature of the US Current Population Surveys to estimate models of year-to-year employment transitions for the quarter century 1968 to 1993. It is found that (1) adequately employed nonmetro workers are more likely than their more urban counterparts to become underemployed; (2) the nonmetro underemployed are less likely to become adequately employed; (3) statistical controls only strengthen these nonmetro disadvantages; (4) the employment transitions of nonmetro workers are less affected by shifts in the direction of thenational economy than are those of metro workers; and (5) nonmetro women are more disadvantaged than women residing elsewhere.