Determinants of Underemployment of Young Adults: A Multi-Country Study

This longitudinal analysis of interview data for the years 1988 and 1990 explores the determinants of three forms of underemployment among young adults: part-time employment, temporary employment, and unemployment. The authors look at two occupational groups (office technology workers and machine Operators) across six European countries (Belgium, England, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and the Netherlands). Factors that affected patterns of underemployment were education, occupational group, initial labor market experience, perceptions of the labor market (interviewees' view of labor market conditions), and organizational socialization practices (the strategies employers took to integrate the young workers into their first jobs). Organizational and societal factors appear to have had greater influence than behavioral variables such as job search strategies and demographic variables such as gender and age. Unemployment and temporary work had many determinants in common; part-time work, in contrast, was affected only by initial labor market experience and organizational socialization practices.