Unemployed need not apply

Or Brett Favre?

 

The question is whether employers should be allowed to preemptively eliminate the currently unemployed from job consideration.

Since the rightwingers are running the whole show now it's a waste of time to even argue about it.

So to sum it up, the rightwingers want:

1) Corporations to be allowed to offshore jobs virtually at will.

2) Corporations to be allowed to sit on limitless tax breaks without hiring.

3) Unemployment benefits cut.

4) Education and retraining programs cut

5) Welfare benefits cut

6) Corporations to be allowed to preemptively refuse to consider hiring the unemployed


So it's pretty clear what their solution to the unemployment problem is:

 

Nobody's saying not to consider job history and experience in a job applicant. That's not the point. The point is, you can have an outstanding job history and experience and still be unemployed for months in an economy like this through no fault of your own. So why should you be completely shut out of the job market?

It would just be very hard to prove an "unemployment discrimination" case if they were to make job status a protected class.

 

How do you not? At some point, you have to start whittling down the applications. If job history isn't the No. 1 category you use, then what is?

 

I guess I would have to see how such a regulation was worded. Right now we're debating a hypothetical onto which we're projecting our own biases and preconceptions.

 

As somebody who was out of full-time work for over a year and found himself having to start back at the bottom, this is one pretty unsavory policy. And as I'm finding out, the presumption that you'll move right back up once employed again is false - potential employers don't look at the higher-level jobs you held before the economy was turned upside down. They look at the job you have now - having been a successful copy editor at a (then) 100,000-circ. daily no longer means jack squat.

 

Won't the market sort that out? If employers find that they can get good employees from this pool, then eventually they will do so. Obviously the question is whether there is some market failure preventing that, which is always why regulation should be used.

 

Again: How is it "ethically wrong" to hire out of self-interest?

You guys are turning this into a subjective moral argument. Make a policy argument.

 

There is a difference between "unemployed" and "not seeking work".

My wife was "unemployed" for almost three years after she was let go from her last full-time job when her previous employer eliminated the department she worked in at the end of 2008.

She collected unemployment for a short time but managed to cobble together some part-time work that gave her something to do periodically over the last couple of years. None of it was in her field of expertise but it was work and it paid. She also started grad school last fall.

She finally landed a full-time job earlier this summer. Technically she was unemployed for almost 2.5 years but she was able to find part-time work to avoid having a long gap in her employment history.

Point is, even if you're out of work you can find things to do if you make some effort to do so. Yeah, it may not make you rich and it may be beneath you, but you can find work.

And not every employer is shutting out people with long gaps in employment. To say all chronically unemployed are excluded from every job on the market because of a long gap in their work history is wildly inaccurate.

 

Don't worry about it. Your precious billionaires will be allowed to continue discriminating to their hearts' content. It's the new normal.

Our brilliant political machine will leap to fulfill its primary objective: coddling, pampering and protecting the billionaires against all threats, real and imagined, to their fabulous fortunes.

 

This is a thread I'd started awhile back on my own situation:

http://www.sportsjournalists.com/forum/threads/79568/

After Peace Corps, it took over a year to find a fairly stable job (with a six-month contract). I never qualified for unemployment in the first place and had been looking for 3-4 months even prior to finishing Peace Corps.

I strung together a bunch of 2-month jobs or so, and, by the third one, I was getting a lot of "well, you have this sketchy job history" -- even though my two pre-PC jobs were of nine and 10 years.

But it looked even worse to not have anything there -- like I wasn't doing anything at all. So I put it on there, as diverse as it was. (Park manager, camp director, ranch cook ghostwriter, international tour organizer, caterer)

Even now, when I apply, I never know what to put when you're supposed to list your last job. If I put my last job *in the industry*, it was back in 2007, before I left Peace Corps. That looks bad, but it's not like I haven't been developing new skills the entire time.

A big problem is PEOPLE don't look at resumes. Computers do. It's basically a sucky no-win situation.

 

Excellent policy argument. Bravo.