Underemployment and Mental Health: A Gendered Examination of Temporal- and Skills-Related Underemployment in Australia Using Longitudinal Data.

Brendan Churchill, The University of Melbourne
Leah Ruppanner

Underemployment has been a persistent and pervasive feature of labour markets but is rarely given the same attention as unemployment. This is because having a job–any job–has been the policy mantra for governments across the globe tackling the rise of precarious work. But we do not know enough about underemployment and its relationship to health. In this paper, we focus on two forms of underemployment; (1) temporal underemployment in which workers find themselves in jobs where they would like more hours; and (2) skills-related underemployment where workers are overqualified or are not using their skills to the fullest in their current job. Drawing on 22 years of data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey, we examine the relationship between these two forms of underemployment and mental health (using the MHI-5) of working Australians aged between 25 and 64 (n=20,725). Underemployment is associated with poor levels of mental health for both men and women workers. The results suggest that having any job does not necessarily protect workers from negative mental health. The findings invite further research on the impacts of underemployment.

Keywords: Economic Demography, Inequality, Disadvantage and Discrimination, Gender Dynamics, Longitudinal studies

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