How To Overcome Unemployment

Photo credit: New Statesman

By Okechukwu Okugo

Do you know that there isn't supposed to be a problem of unemployment in the society, rather, what we really should have had is underemployment?

Firstly, unemployment by my own definition is the inability of someone to secure a due job in order to earn a living. 

There is really a job for everyone. Though many people will be skeptical about this and might think I am sounding crazy but it is true. 

Economics say human wants are insatiable, and so it is, the ability of people creating jobs for themselves.

Now we've come to the issue of what is a job or what is employment? In my usual definition, a job is whatever service someone does in order to earn a legitimate living. And employment is a situation whereby one can say they are doing something to earn a living. 

Now, let us try to connect the link between human wants and job creation. But first of all, let us examine some of the human basic wants and needs. There is a need to put on clothes, live in a house, eat something every day; there is a need to cut or groom the hair, there is a need to nurture the skin, keep the environment and our homes clean, there is the need to read, write, laugh and entertain ourselves, there is the need to stay healthy, there is the need to buy and sell uncountable goods and services, etc. Whatever something someone cannot do for themselves, or have a desire or groping for but it is not readily available for them, provides a vacuum for seeking the solution from someone else. Because human wants are insatiable, what we seek solutions to is inexhaustible; and that opens the way for others to step in to fill the void and thereby creating a job for themselves and others.

When someone creates the job by solving people's problems, the more others become aware of their services, their clientele base grows more than only him or she can satisfy, that is where employing someone else comes in. And when someone else is employed, the issue of salary or wages comes in. And this is where the complaints of underemployment can be heard. The one employed for the job may be overqualified for the task and that is where the talk of not being paid the commensurate wage or salary comes in. And this is more so because many people are not duly paid in their workplaces, and it is understandable because nobody who earns a salary should be expecting to be paid higher than what he or she can actually make for their working places, and it follows that most times what they are being paid at the end of the working period becomes only a fraction of what they had made for their bosses. 

So why do you move around looking for a job for so many years and crying of unemployment after leaving college without stopping, thinking, and doing something? 

It simply means you are looking for someone who has decided to solve an aspect of human wants and needs and seeking to help them continue to do so and be paid a fraction of what you can actually work out for them.

Why not look around you and ask yourself, what services can you provide to the society or community and get paid?

Doing so will surely make you gainfully employed. And when each and every one of us look for that insatiable human desires, wants, and needs, which we know must always be there, we all can be gainfully employed solving one another's problems.