The Great Jobs Deception: Why More Workforce Education Will Not Solve the Problem of Inadequate Jobs

Have you ever wondered why the more you improve yourself the harder it is to find decent employment? For most of us, work is not working. It is not just a matter of working harder for less, year after year, but of losing things that matter--socially useful work that gives us purpose, self-esteem, and a place in our communities. While some people don't have enough work to live, others are working so much they barely have a life.

When work is unfulfilling and careers stagnate, a typical reaction is to go back to school for more skills and credentials. We are led to believe that if we only make ourselves better--work harder, learn new skills, network with the "right" people--that we will find work that fulfills us. The system exhorts us to continually scrutinize our own shortcomings, yet no one applies the same level of critical scrutiny to the system and structures that make work unrewarding, exhausting, or unfulfilling.

The Great Jobs Deception is based on a doctoral dissertation that analyzed underemployment among professionals in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math), health care, legal and academic occupations. These were individuals who had a minimum of a college degree, and many who had post-graduate or professional degrees. The survey sample was comprised of a demographically and geographically dispersed population--that is, they were not all recent graduates looking for their first professional job, nor were they atypical of the American population as a whole. Yet, 60% of the individuals in this group experienced underemployment at some point over their career. The statistics and stories that came out of this study bolster the evidence that structural features of the job market create an oversupply of multiple skill reserves. This professional reserve army is good for business because it operates to cheapen and disempower even professional-level workers.

The Great Jobs Deception exposes the fallacies of the so-called knowledge economy and the propaganda of the skills shortage crisis, which keeps all of us on a constant treadmill without questioning the broader forces that keep us there. We cannot--and indeed should not--expect the corporatocracy to create "jobs." Instead, the Great Jobs Deception advocates for the creation of livelihoods that are designed to fulfill human needs and serve our communities.

Brynne VanHettinga has spent a lifetime attempting to understand why work isn't working for most of us. As a young adult getting started, Brynne experienced the "working poor" version of underemployment--a string of multiple low-wage, dead-end jobs that had no future. Knowing that education was the only way up and out, Brynne earned a B.S. in economics and finance, and then went on to law school.

After law school, Brynne opened a solo public-interest private law practice, where she represented families and employees. Over some 10 years and several states, Brynne was a first- hand witness to the struggles of people who worked for a living (lack of time, lack of money, family stress from inability to plan for the future, desperation and hopelessness) as well as the increasing hostility of the "system" (particularly the federal judiciary) to the plight of people who work for a living.

Brynne again sought answers in education, earning a Ph.D. in Public Policy and Administration in 2015. Her doctoral dissertation picked up the intervening research since the first paper she had written on underemployment as an undergraduate. However, this time the study focused on underemployment of highly educated and skilled professionals. The theory was that this paradox challenged the claims of political and economic elites, who allege that the answer to un- and under-employment is to upgrade workforce skill levels. The majority of these studies suggest that underemployment is a result of more permanent structural features of the labor market rather than a lack of worker skills or solely the result of short-term recessionary fluctuations.

Yet, research on underemployment tends to be fragmented and sporadic, and hardly anyone outside of academia is aware of this research. Brynne wrote The Great Jobs Deception so that lay audiences of educated and professional workers understand what is happening to them in the "job market." What all of us do for a living should provide for our reasonable material needs, utilize our education and skills, and serve some greater social purpose, not support a system that is designed to expropriate our talent, our intellect, and maybe even our very souls.