As if it wasn't bad enough that the unemployment rate is sky-high and not looking so great for the foreseeable future, now some companies are not willing to hire unemployed applicants.
Apparently, it's a mechanism to screen out people who have particular profiles of race or age and possibly people that have out-of-date skills.
Let's hear it for living in the good ol' USA!
Click on the link to go to this vomitous article in the Seattle Times.
Has this been mentioned in any treatise on the death of capitalism? Throwing away workers with such selective scorn?
ReplyDeleteMy take: The primary goal isn't to discriminate based on age or race. Employers have always been cut throat. Thus the conventional wisdom: "Don't quit your job until you have a new one lined up." They can be even more selective. Since most workers are already doing at least two jobs while wearing one hat, this allows employers to pick and choose the most well-trained or well-educated workers. Employers are forcing even bigger work loads on workers, and they know these new hires will smile and take it.
The discrimination angle, while partly true, looks more like a diversion from the cold fact that the applicant/job ration is 5:1. This should be an incendiary statistic, because it's going to get worse. Instead of addressing these implications and the social unrest that ought to follow, how many are stopped cold and silenced from dissent by the mere hint of discrimination?
Looking at this practice from a well corrected lens: instead of walking away from this divide and conquer move, we need to band together and go Egypt on our own government.
Speaking of leadership, our Speaker of the House (Drunk - Ohio), said "so be it" if the GOP budget kills more jobs. Wouldn't it be fun to run a Trading Places scam on his ass? He wakes up in an airport bathroom and his watch on longer reads Gstaad.
Go Egypt? If they wouldn't do it when King George W. stole the election, what makes you think they're going to do it now? No, Americans are still under the illusion that they have too much to lose. They are too terrified. They have to reach the boiling point like Egypt if there is going to be meaningful change. Even then, I doubt it would ever happen now that this is a government by the corporations for the corporattions.
ReplyDeleteAll you say is true, but don't rule out the wild cards.
ReplyDeleteAmericans aren't willing to die for their own revolution. Our ignorance doesn't make our situation as dire as North Korea's, but most of us also don't have a clue of what's going on outside our existence. Most of us like it this way, so we don't bother to react in a meaningful way. (Tea Baggers don't count, because they're more ignorant than your average American. Even my youngest kid is exasperated with them. 'Don't they even know what their name means?')
Most of the time, we assume and believe accordingly. While other regions are being squeezed into unlivable conditions, our food and fuel prices are kept artificially low, but when America blows, it will be different from what we're seeing in the Arab States and Iran.
Wild cards = Our mainstream leadership starts to crack. (You saw this after Katrina hit. People who always stay on message suddenly go way off message.) Next you'll see the fracturing of loyalties within law enforcement. Finally, the next generation of doc dumps i.e. Wikileaks 2. If our government moves against Julian Assange, and people are informed and react, what happens next might still be undecided.
More on Egypt from the Palestinian Papers:
ReplyDeletehttp://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/02/20112148356117884.html