Underemployment's cruel waste

A job, when viewed from a corner table at Starbucks, is a scarce and enviable commodity.

It's here that I meet Lionel Dionne, 42, whose disarming candour and indefatigable optimism betray none of the frustrations that he has faced.

Across from us sits a stocky young man who's nursing a coffee and, according to Dionne, working on a book. Dionne knows of two other would-be authors at this Starbucks in east-end Ottawa.

When the coffee shop is your office, you get to know the regulars -- be they dreamer, drifter or, in Dionne's case, underemployed academic.

From the corner perch, where he spends his days with a laptop, Dionne works on short-term government contracts while searching -- unsuccessfully -- for longer-term jobs. No call-backs, no interviews, no prospects.

This has been Dionne's routine for the past year. Every morning, he heads for Starbucks after dropping off his wife at the University of Ottawa, where she's on track to become a tenured professor.

While both of them have PhDs -- she in education, he in business -- she is the breadwinner. He's still looking for work fully three years after the couple left their native New Brunswick.

Dionne's story is about the loss of personal potential and a sad waste of public investment.

You could say his successes have been largely academic: bursaries, an MBA, a PhD, a post-doctoral fellowship and a decade of teaching.

But this year, while his wife makes $80,000, Dionne will bring in just under $20,000. It's a steep climb down from the $55,000 a year teaching job he left at the Universite de Moncton.

The couple decamped for Ottawa after the U of O hired his wife. Dionne quit his job to follow her, thinking it would easy to find work.

He was dead wrong.

The U of O turned him down, as did the Universite du Quebec en Outaouais and the federal public service. Even after he learned to leave the PhD off his resume for fear of being overqualified, Dionne had no luck landing full-time work.

It doesn't seem right that a person of Dionne's credentials should be slumming as a free agent. An over-educated underclass is a squandered resource that strains relationships, tears at the social fabric and invites bitterness, alienation or worse.

Dionne tells the story of a former colleague who quit his job to follow his wife to France. While she was recruited by a university, he found himself out of work. Now a stay-at-home dad in the French town of Tours, he keeps in touch with Dionne by e-mail.

The other day, Dionne became worried after his friend mused openly about suicide. "He told me that he walked by the Loire River and wondered what being at the bottom would feel like."

Dionne stifles a sheepish laugh: "I'm not there yet."

Still, there are strains in even the most supportive relationships. "With my wife, work is a taboo word," he says. "We don't talk about it."

The invisible problem of underemployment is just starting to be acknowledged. In April, Statistics Canada released its first survey on overqualification among Canadians. The study found that one in five university graduates work at jobs that require little more than a high school education.

So much for the knowledge economy.

According to StatsCan, most of the underemployed are young workers. They are also immigrants and people with commerce, arts or humanities degrees. Many work in the low-paying retail or wholesale sector, and many toil in silent frustration.

While younger workers are more likely to be underemployed, older workers have a higher chance of being stuck in underemployment. This is not news that would cheer Dionne.

There are times when he pines for a career in the trades, blessed as he is with self-taught carpentry, electrical and plumbing skills. Yet despite his occasional blue-collar envy -- he and his wife built their own house -- Dionne is reluctant, at least for the time being, to abandon his search for a job that utilizes his training. "I've got too much education to do construction work," he says.

In this age of outsourcing and job insecurity, our society seems to have forgotten that a job is not only about producing goods and services, but about the experience of fulfilling work.

Canada will continue to squander its knowledge workers until policy makers recognize that along with investments in education and lifelong learning, more needs to be done to make effective use of a skilled workforce.

Pauline Tam's column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

E-mail: ptam@thecitizen.canwest.com