Disentangling Underemployment and Precarious Work: A Latent Profile Analysis

As global labor markets become increasingly unstable, scholars have attempted to operationalize and categorize different forms of poor-quality work, such as with underemployment and precarious work. While these have significant implications for mental health and other outcomes, scholars have mostly studied different forms of underemployment using variable-centered assumptions, which assume homogeneity among workers. However, person-centered approaches may be better suited to studying underemployment because of varying patterns of employment in different industries and occupational categories. Therefore, with a sample of working adults (N = 1,016), we used latent profile analysis to identify profiles of subjective underemployment using seven indicators. We found three distinct profiles: Fully employed, stable underemployed, and precarious workers. Subsequent analyses exploring symptoms of distress, meaningful work, decent work, occupational classification, and level of education revealed key distinctions among the groups, such as precarious workers having the greatest distress and poorest working conditions. Taken together, this study provides a meaningful distinction between underemployed and precarious workers, while highlighting the relevance of these employment groups for several key outcomes.