Under-employment

Under-employment is what you get from a country that no longer cares about you!

One example of under-employment is when you allow too many temporary services agencies to do the hiring.  The unemployment rate is determined primarily through unemployment wages being paid out.  What they don’t tell you about working for a temp agency is that, once the employer that you were hired to work for, no longer needs you, you go back to the temp agency for more work.  Then, if there isn’t more work, you apply for unemployment.  The temp agency will get a notice that they will need to start paying more unemployment insurance because you are trying to collect unemployment.  They will then give you the required amount of hours to keep themselves from paying more into the unemployment pool.  If you were working temp full-time, after being laid off from a previous employer for an extended period, you can take the total number of wages made for the year and divide the total by the number of weeks in the year so far, and then divide by two for your approximate weekly unemployment wages (which don’t start right away).  So if you were only making enough to live week to week or month to month before, now you need to live on half of that.

Also, as was the case with me a number of years ago, When I applied for unemployment because I was getting laid-off too often, My Guard duty for the Air National Guard, eliminated my getting unemployment for two weeks out of the four weeks in a month because I had been laid-off so much that a Saturday from drill covered one week of unemployment, and Sunday covered the next.  I was a lowly enlisted person at the time so I wasn’t making a fortune on Drill weekends.  The temp agency determined that they needed to give me enough hours to make $50 each week for two weeks.  If I remember correctly, rent alone was around $300 plus food and expenses.  I didn’t have cable tv, the internet didn’t exist yet, and cell phones were in a large bag and only for the rich, so I didn’t have extra expenses that were frivolous.  Eventually, I quit school and had to move away to begin making enough to pay the bills.  The most fortunate part of all of this is that I used to be a good saver.  I would save as much money as possible to make sure that I could pay the bills in case of a ‘rainy day’.  The unfortunate part is that, employment wise, it’s been pouring on me since the 1980’s, and every time that I saved a decent amount in my ‘rainy day’ fund, I had to spend it on bills.