American Journal of Community Psychology, Vol. 32, Nos. 1/2, September 2003 ( C  2003) Underemployment in America: Measurement and Evidence Leif Jensen 1,2 and Tim Slack 1 An important way in which employment hardship has come to be conceptualized and measured is as underemployment. Underemployment goes beyond mere unemployment (being out of a job and looking for work), to include those who have given up looking for work, part- time workers whose employer(s) cannot give them full-time work, and the working poor. To provide needed background for the other articles in this special issue, we trace the history of the concept of underemployment, review existing empirical literature, offer a critique of the measurement of underemployment as conventionally operationalized, and provide up-to-date evidence on the trends and correlates of underemployment in the United States. KEY WORDS: employment; unemployment; underemployment; working poor; discouraged workers. The economic turmoil of the Great Depression changed the way Americans thought about poverty at the time (Levitan, Mangum, & Mangum, 1998). To that point the prevailing view held that poverty was caused by individual deficiencies among the poor. Able-bodied people who were poor because they were not working were regarded as lazy and unde- serving of societal aid. With the Depression came widespread joblessness, and a recognition that to some extent the causes of poverty were rooted in the structure of the economy and society, rather than the blameworthy individual characteristics of the poor themselves. It is no coincidence that in the 1930s industrializing nations of the West began to collect unemployment statistics as a way to gauge the per- formance of the labor market and the social circum- stances of its workers (Clogg, 1979). The unemploy- ment rate has been a mainstay of social indicators ever since. Clogg (1979, p. 2) writes, “[i]t is difficult indeed to conceive of another socioeconomic statistic that has been more influential in public policy debate, more critical in the shaping of modern political cleavage, 1 Department of Agricultural Economics & Rural Sociology, The Pennsylvania State University. 2 To whom correspondence should be addressed at Department of Agricultural Economics & Rural Sociology, The Pennsylvania State University, Armsby Building, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802-5600; e-mail: lijl@psu.edu. or more central to social scientific theory about the socioeconomic order.” The calculation of the unemployment rate is rela- tively simple. The numerator of the rate is the number of people in a population who are unemployed, that is, who are not currently working and are actively look- ing for a job, plus the number who are on layoff. The base (denominator) of the rate is the number of peo- ple in a population who are economically active. Often referred to simply as the “labor force,” this econom- ically active population consists of those people who are unemployed (as defined above) plus those who are currently working. Thus, the unemployment rate is simply the number unemployed divided by the num- ber in the labor force (employed plus unemployed). Assuming it is calculated monthly or annually, the un- employment rate can be used to track the state of the labor market over time. Within a given point in time, it can also be used to describe inequalities between groups (Whites vs. Blacks, men vs. women, Floridians vs. Texans) in their prevalence of joblessness. Despite its centrality, labor market scientists have long pointed out the inadequacies of the unem- ployment rate in capturing the full array of types of employment hardship (Hauser, 1974). As an alterna- tive, some have proposed and advocated the broader concept of underemployment which goes beyond mere unemployment to include additional forms of inadequate employment (Clogg, 1979; Hauser, 1974; 21 0091-0562/03/0900-0021/0 C  2003 Plenum Publishing Corporation